About two months ago, my spouse announced she’s going to visit our daughter (George) in Florida for Christmas. She didn’t expect me to want to go because of… well, let’s just say “issues.” Our other daughter, Fred was also going.
“Count me in,” I said, without a lot of enthusiasm — as when agreeing to go to a much-needed dentist appointment. Frankly, I didn’t want to relive the angst that ultimately led to a series of cardiologist visits like last time.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“No,” and I wasn’t. “but add me to the reservation.”
Coordinating with Fred, my…
Our Christmas letter this year was…well, bland due to my wife’s insistence that I not make it more interesting. I offer this to my friends who really understand my penchant for exaggeration and frivolity.
Another year has passed for the Redmond Vaughn’s. At least we survived. I would like to announce my YA series The Seldith Chronicles has been picked up by Pixar. They plan to make the heroic efforts of Hisbil and his clan of Seldith elves into a series of feature-length movies sometime in 2018. I’ll be moving to Emeryville, California (I have no idea where this is)…
It occurs to me, the uproar about Muslims, terrorists and madmen coming to American to end life as we know it, is all about fear. The Daesh (what I prefer to call ISIS or ISIL) wants us to be afraid. The NRA, your local gun store and the arms industry as a whole, wants us to be afraid. And the fear mongering does not stop there. The pharma industry wants us to be afraid of illnesses we’ve never heard of and are never likely to catch. …
And then again, a large complex of stores might not make much sense in the future, but in the future…
I’m working on The Timkers — Borrowed Time, where the story is set in 2084. The world is a very different place for people as computer “personal assistants” anticipate our every (as in every) need. If we don’t destroy the world before then, imagine putting on your Hololens and shopping in a virtual mall.
Of course, by 2084, technology will have created implants which attach directly to the optical and auditory nerve centers in the brain, so we won’t need…
Since I live within artillery range of Microsoft, I got up at 06:30 to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting. I showed up early and got a cup of tea to chat with other stockholders (many were my age or older). Perhaps I would find a publisher for one of my books. I found very few who seemed technically literate, gazing glassy-eyed at the demo machines as if they had just stepped off a bus from 1960. …
Faced with the unintended (but not wholly unforeseeable) side-effects of toppling yet another leader in the Mideast, we Americans have been given a gift — a golden opportunity as it were. Enemies of civilization masquerading as radical “Muslims” have destroyed Syria and have threatened to destroy other countries in the region — even France, Britain, Russia and the United States.
After World War I, traditional ethnic boundaries in the Mideast were redrawn in an attempt to homogenize these very diverse cultures which historically mixed as well as oil, tears, and sand. Following decades of bungled foreign policy which began far…
“George Orwell was 100 years off.” Sam Harkins: The Timkers — Déjà Vu.
I was six chapters into Borrowed Time, the next book in The Timkers series when it occurred to me that in order to take readers into the future, I would need to fully understand what 2084 would be like. Unlike earlier books where I did exhaustive research on 1930 and 1862, there’s not a lot written about what’s really going to happen in 2084. What would life be like for ordinary moms, dads and teens, and workers, and bosses? Would life be easier, or filled with new…
For the second time in as many weeks, another author has approached me about the cover for The Timkers —Déjà Vu. They wanted to know how I did it — or did I hire it out. We don’t like it, but books are judged by their covers, so readers not intrigued by a cover will keep looking. After all, there are (they say) forty-thousand new book covers every month for them to judge. I’m not going to venture into the logic behind having a half-naked woman clutched in the arms of a bare-chested man for a romance novel. Clearly, this…
“Okay, by morning,” Ben said, taking the papers and closing the door. His back to the tiny room, his eyes all but overflowing with tears, he gazed down into the empty lot below where a disheveled soul picked through a trash bin, eating something he had found. Ben crushed the papers.
“Bad news?” April’s eyes didn’t leave her remodeling program where yuppies debated the wisdom of a steel sofa.
Ben nodded. Four steps later, he closed the bedroom door and sat staring at a Salinas print Hill Country Bluebonnets. The sun in his face, he could feel the grass on…
William Vaughn
Writer, photographer, graphics artist, troublemaker…
