Summertime Livin’

Sorry, folks, for the long hiatus from writing, but — it’s summer.  #sorrynotsorry

Days are long (and sometimes hot). There are books to be read, games to be played, people to be seen, and (most importantly) fresh produce to be consumed — made a cobbler today; cannot WAIT till all those fresh tomatoes roll in!

(Bonus: My favorite quick peach  cobbler recipe.)

Discovered a new author – Octavia Butler. One of her book collections was on sale last week in the iBooks store, so I picked it up after reading that one of her short stories won a Hugo back in the 1980s. Found that book on Kindle and rolled through it rapidly in the last couple days — Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Turns out, Butler was probably the first African-American woman science fiction author, and one of the only black writers in the genre, period.  Bloodchild included a couple of fantastic personal essays by her on becoming a writer – you can find them online here (I’ll link to the first as a PDF) and I recommend reading both:

“Positive Obsession”
“Furor Scribendi”

If you happen to pick up the story collection, don’t miss the short story “Speech Sounds,” which won her a Hugo award.  It’s an outstanding piece.

Been also wasting some good time playing games. Was given a tip by a coworker to enjoy the typographic gem Type:Rider (desktop; also for iOS or Android), a 2D platformer built totally around typefaces and fonts. The art is gorgeous and every level imparts tons of historical and artistic information about how various font families and printing developed. Definitely two thumbs up as a learning experience, as an interactive work of art, and as a solid game in its own right.

Type:Rider – TRAILER – EN from Cosmografik on Vimeo.

I might get around to some more writing in the next few weeks, but my day job is stealing most of my creative juices right now, leaving me with plenty of seeds and thoughts but little energy to get them all into words by the time I come home. I’ve done some more thinking on “Careers as Verbs”– I think that could develop into useful prompts for discussing calling and vocation, especially with young people who are trying to figure out what to study or what to do after graduation.  We make college students choose from a list of nouns when they’re picking a major when most of our lives are spent in action.

Along the way, we hope to tidy up a couple home improvement projects, do a little organizing, and see some friends. And eat good food.  Must enjoy the heck out of summer! (Looking for some good eats? Try these pork carnitas.)

I hope your summer is swimmingly awesome too.