Category: 3 – Odds & Ends

#NotMyCanada – the 2024 Federal Budget and the CDB

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Hey. Politicians. The career ones in Canada, specifically, y’know, the ones up at the federal and provincial levels. Yes, I know, you’re busy trying to look busy, but I vote, you can take a minute. Let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s pretend, just for a moment, that this is a democracy and you actually care what the people of Canada want and need. I know, I know, it’s a crazy idea. Anyone not hopelessly naive knows that politics is a game of tricking the population into voting for you and the winning team gets a chance to make money…

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Why I Switched to ClassicPress

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Look closely at any of my writing sites. See any difference? Any breakage? No? I switched everything to ClassicPress, a new hard fork of WordPress, rather than update to WordPress’ 5.0.x. (Here’s a footnote: WordPress is open source, which means that others can take the code and make changes to it and create something new. A ‘fork’ is what it sounds like: it’s an offshoot that forms when people start making changes in a different direction.) I don’t know whether 5.0.x would have broken anything on my sites. After all, they’re pretty lightweight and straightforward. But given the many people…

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Pansexual, not bisexual

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I originally wrote this back in Sept 2015 for a [now defunct] online magazine to which I submitted a few short pieces. I’ve spent some time thinking about whether it really belongs here. I’ve decided that, while it isn’t specifically about writing as such, it does make a point about the importance of a single word, a label, in self-identity. This matters, or should matter, to anyone whose writing involves character diversity, and not only in regards to orientation or gender. Reposted here with a few small corrections. When I first realized that I wasn’t straight, I took a look around me…

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Introductions

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There are millions of blogs already in existence, does the world really need another one? No, probably not, but that doesn’t stop anyone else! So why not? What’s this one about? Very simply, it’s about writing. More specifically, writing novel-length fantasy. It isn’t about getting published by a “real publisher”. Nor is it about grammar and fine points of style (though I can’t promise there will never be a post touching on it). It’s about the creative part of the process, when you actually sit down and tell a story, and about the editing process, when you look at the…

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