PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

two billion years ago today 2003-01-13 - 6:49 p.m. Years ago, not long after I moved into my current house, I stopped writing science fiction and started cutting stones. One night, I woke up in a cold sweat from a dream about a stone I had been cutting that originated from the Precambrian Shield in Wisconsin. At that time, I believed the stone to be two billion years old. Perhaps it is more likely to be 1 to 3/4 of a billion years old. In any case, in the dream, time was like standing on a cliff. Another two billion years had passed, and an alien (from outer space as opposed to Mexico) had discovered the stone. I rarely experience nightmares or terrors in my dreams. I did in that one. I could see this alien being looking at the stone and knowing that it had been cut by another sentient being, and there was a feeling of falling off the cliff of time like a bottomless pit. I am thinking about that dream today because I am thinking about why I (or any of us) write. There is a pretty simple explanation of why I began to write for money: If you have a psychopath stalking you, it doesn't make sense to do anything where you have to be in a predictable place at a predictable time. Most people, though, don't write for money. It's a silly thing to do, like planning on winning the lottery. For every Stephen King who makes $60 million a year, there are thousands who can't even get their work read. The whole Writer's Market scam of leading people to believe that unsolicited novels are still read by any publisher is particularly cruel. They waste people's life forces to sell a, what, $19.95 book? Making a lot of money from writing a book should no longer motivate anyone, unless they have a name like Ethan Hawke or Bill Clinton. It isn't going to happen. So now people can write out of pure honesty...out of having something to say. Having said all this, I'm amazed and impressed at the reaction to BF's novel after having it online for only 24 hours. A reader already commented, "If you and Vernor Vinge switched birthdates, you would have published your novel in the conventional way years ago, and he would be putting his stuff on K-5." Yes. My thoughts exactly. Some people think it's all about money. No, it's all about birthdates. If BF were born a bit earlier, he would be a well-known, albeit dinosaurian, writer, because he has the gift, he has the discipline, he has the technical knowledge, and he has something to say. For a diaryland example, a "squirrelx" would certainly be a frequently published and sought-after writer. She might still be broke, as Manly Wade Wellman or Philip K. Dick were often broke, because publishers didn't pay fairly, but she would certainly be aware of having an audience, as those writers couldn't avoid knowing that they had a large audience. Speaking of having something to say, I'm fairly sure I'm rambling. I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you want to reach a space alien or an anthropologist or whatever to be remembered scadzillions of years from now, carve a stone or make some elaborate gold jewelry. Better yet, in one word: megaliths, which is itself a form of stone-work. But if you want to communicate to people today, get on the internet. In neither case do you make money. Is that important? Does anyone lay awake at night wondering if Tutankhamen's goldsmith got paid, considering Tut was killed at 19 and it's quite likely the goldsmith didn't last much longer? In the end, I think the most important thing is to meditate on "the good, the beautiful, and the pure," as Paul said in one of his more sensible ramblings. And maybe to cause others to meditate on same? back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford