I review "Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling", by Henry Lien. Spoiler: I liked it.

When people ask me what I do in my day job [1], my answer is usually "I'm a futurist". That's not quite accurate, but good enough, and also a great conversation starter. The more accurate description, which is also in my LinkedIn profile, is that I create thought leadership. That's a much-abused term that often is just code for marketing copy.

I have a bunch of books on my "to reread" list because they've been a big influence on me in some way, and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin and its sequels were on it. I have Wizard in the paperback edition from 1983, and that's probably also around when I first read it. So why review such an old series of books?

I wrote about our "loan goats" a while back; they ended up staying 2 1/2 years before finally moving back to their owner last spring. Alas, with them leaving we had to cut the grass in that part of the property ourselves again. Even worse, the brambles came back with a vengeance. And even that wouldn't be so bad if the chickens didn't like to find a cozy space in the bramble patch to lay from time to time.

Big news: over the summer, my wife and I made the decision that I would retire from my day job. I phrase it that way because I don't plan to go completely work free (who does?), and I've mentioned a potential project in the last update post before I had even considered retiring. And novel writing is also going to continue, of course; I've started outlining a sequel to A Basquet of Cats.

Last year, I got a great Humble Bundle: a bunch of books by John Scalzi, currently one of the most successful authors of SF. Which means that his books might pop up on the review pages from time to time in the coming months. My first "encounter" with JS (in the parasocial sense) was when reading up on the whole…

As promised last week, here the first book review: Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman. DCC is LitRPG, short for literary role-playing game. I’ve played tabletop RPGs since the mid 1980s [1], computer RPGs almost as long [2], and of course I’ve read fantasy for even longer, but I’ve never imagined the combination would work in fiction. It does. It works very well.

Been remiss again; day job is busy, of course, and once again I am wondering how people manage to have a 9-to-5 job, do chores, write novels and other stuff, exercise, have other hobbies, and not neglect family and social contacts, all at the same time. I am happy if I manage 4 or 5 of the above list. Anyway, a few writing updates:

The marketing slogan is supposed to alter consumer habits and bolster domestic manufacturing, but its long history reveals darker motivations.

As you can guess from my bio, I'm not exactly a spring chicken, and have been doing my day job for quite a while. Meaning mentoring and giving back is a thing in this phase of my career, and that includes helping young(er) colleagues build their brand and personal eminence; their value proposition.[1] So I found it slightly ironic when I was recently required to attend a mandatory internal training on "Building eminence for your professional growth".