I’ve been blocked since November last year. I was in the middle of NaNoWriMo. For a couple days, I locked myself in my bedroom, faced my laptop, and tried to will out the words onto the screen. After this failed, I decided to take a break and work on other things, such as what I’ll be doing for work in 2015.

Since then, it’s been difficult to write blog posts and journal entries, much less fiction. I’ve had a break today, though. I thought that one problem might be my environment. I had been cutting sugar lately and trying not to spend too much money in coffee shops, and at the same time my writing output was negligible. So I gave myself a break, hit up the bookstore, bought some chai tea, and prayed I be able to write anything.

How have I started off 2015? By applying to graduate school.

Despite my earlier reticence, I’m moving forward with seeking a suitable Masters program, one with an emphasis on practical computer programming. Mostly this means not applying for a vanilla Computer Science curriculum, given that two years of theory won’t help my job prospects after graduation. I’ve been programming professionally for years now, and I want a program that complements my existing skills, not one that ignores them.

2014 is nearly gone. Good riddance.

I wonder if this year was good for anybody at all, apart from a certain status quo in the halls of power. For me, it wasn’t so great on either a personal level or a national level. I’ve been dragging myself through the weeds most of this year, getting out of some toxic relationships and trying to find my muse again.

Oh, writer’s block? “Blocked” doesn’t begin to cover it. More like “buried under the debris of that tunnel you saw the light at the end of.” That’s another story.

(I attended Viable Paradise in 2012. Here’s some advice to this year’s writers, to be read after you finish.)

George R. R. Martin once divided writers into two camps: architects, those who obsessively plan everything in detail, and gardeners, those who plant seeds in nourishing soil and hope for the best.

Since I began using computers in the early nineties, I’ve gone through five different word processors: DeskMate, AppleWorks, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, and LibreOffice. I’ve shuffled through as many computers and operating systems, from DOS to Mac OS X. I know – very well – the pain of incompatible file formats, starting in college when my professors sent me commented Word documents that AppleWorks couldn’t read.

I’m taking some time off from Facebook.

As an American, one shouldn’t need reminding of the civil liberties that we enjoy. Ostensibly, we as citizens read the Constitution in school, either in Civics or U.S. Government, and each amendment in the Bill of Rights is picked clean apart.

Well, no, it turns out that some people, such as one Roy Moore, still need reminding after all.

Something really pissed me off this morning. I was reading a Cracked article about some hard truths of the so-called Men’s Rights Advocates (or MRAs). One of the affiliated forums on Reddit (called subreddits) is r/TheRedPill, which advocates some hard-line misogyny.

I’ve just waded into a long, waist-deep stream of revisions to my YA novel, The Red Flood. After some lackluster feedback from agents and a thorough critique by my friend Alison, I decided to pull it and bring it back to the workbench.

The Red Flood is about two young women, on the run from a paramilitary group, trying to survive on a hostile planet. Things become more complicated when they discover the group that caused the environmental catastrophe on their world – and a way to save what’s left.