eAdventure Tiles

As I attempt to encourage people to boycott the products of Wizards of the Coast, I feel the need to offer alternatives. Those of you who play pencil and paper rpg’s know the value of a good map. There are a number of sources for good miniature scale maps, but none of them has the breadth of product that Skeleton Key Games has. www.skeletonkeygames.com offers miniatures scale maps for fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero games in a mind-boggling variety. Try them out.

Book Excepts

Well, this blog is supposed to be mostly about my writing, with a bit thrown in about teaching. Lately I’ve gotten off on all kinds of topic tangents. I need to get back to basics a bit. Part of this is, as I’ve written already, that I’m having a hard time focusing on doing any writing. There are two main causes for this: work is taking up all my brain power, and I’m not getting any feedback to encourage me. This coming week, I’m going to start posting some excerpts of my stories. Please read them and shoot me a comment. Feel free to just say you liked it, but I’d really prefer some criticism. And thanks in advance. I’m also going to try posting more about what I’m doing in the classroom. I think that there are quite a few people out there who would like to know what’s going on in schools these days. Stick around and I’ll try to give you a glimpse.

Free Book Cover Designs

You may have seen my post a couple of weeks ago about Book Cover Pro. I purchased a copy and have created a couple of book covers. I would like a little bit more practice, so I am offering to create a few custom covers free. Between now and the end of the year, that’s 12-31-08, I will be glad to create a custom cover for your book. Send me the vital information– Title, Author ISBN, back cover blurb, and any other information you would like on the cover. If you have a photo or graphic you want used, then send that too. Tell me the size of book and how many pages it is.

mrallison@cox.net

Calling on Parents

The truth is that I have always hated talking on the phone. I do it as little as possible. My cell phone minutes usually run in the single digits each month. But part of my job as teacher is to call parents. Unfortunatley this has not helped cure me of my dislike for using the phone. Of the twenty or so parents I’ve called so far this year for help with unruly students, only one has been helpful. This is just the latest in a trend. It seems to get worse every year. Instead of trying to help me make the student accountable for their actions, 95% or parents (as judged from this sample) want to argue on their child’s behalf that inappropriate behavior is excusable. This is not only not helpful, it is doing a disservice to the child.

Politics

More and more I read about people who are tired of the political ads and of the election in general. You hear the same thing in the course of every election. I’m not one of those people. I actually enjoy politics and political ads. Of course I don’t take any of them at face value. I like to check them out at http://www.factcheck.org/ and see how much bending of the truth they do. I think though that you can tell a lot about a candidate from what they say about their opponent. Since my students are checking out my blog, I’m not going to list who I’m supporting until just before the election, but I have made my contribution, both by caucusing, and by giving funds (to a candidate not shown here).

Happy Birthday Victoria

Please join me in wishing a very happy birthday to my lovely wife Victoria. Happy birthday sweetheart.

Writer’s Block? Writer’s Fatigue and Writer’s Fugue

Writer’s block? Not really. What I have is writer’s fatigue and writer’s fugue. I’m just so tired by the time I get home after a day in the classroom, I don’t feel like doing anything as mentally strenuous as writing. Plus, I’m just not very motivated right now. When people are reading your writing and giving you feedback, it’s easy to stay motivated. I was writing up a storm this time last year. Now, waiting for replies from agents and publishers, I just can’t seem to get into it. I have only about a chapter and a half left of the first draft of His Robot Girlfriend, so I should be able to whip it out. Maybe next week.

This is Why There are No Time Travelers

If time travel is invented some time in the future, we would have already seen time travelers. And no, they couldn’t have just been careful. Despite what conspiracy theorists think, humans are really never very careful. But just think about it for a moment. Imagine there was a great event you wanted to witness, and you had a time machine. Say you went back to September 1776 to watch the First Continental Congress meet. Already you have time travelers squeezed into a small room along with the 55 delegates. For the sake of argument, say only one time traveler was there and he was invisible. And let’s say that there is a rule that he is the only one that gets to visit that time period and that place. Somebody else can’t show up while he’s there. Even if that is the case, sooner or later, somebody is going to want to go back and verify his findings. Or maybe recording technology has advanced so much that they want to go back and get better footage of the event. Now you have two time travelers there. Even if a time traveler only went back to that particular time every 500 years, within 10,000 years of time travel you would have enough travellers to outnumber the delegates four to one. But I expect that people would travel more often than that. Tourists would want to see the First Continental Congress. And if it was really interesting, they would want to see it again, and bring the kids. Soon, Independence Hall would explode at the seems. We should not only have seen time travelers already. We should be seeing many multiples of them.

Why Aren’t There Any Time Travelers?

There will never be time travel. There won’t. People will never be able to go back in time. It’s too bad, but that’s just the way it is. Of course string theory says that time travel is theoretically possible, but it will never happen. There will never be time travelers. I’ll tell you why tomorrow.

Wallpapers

I’m always looking for new desktop wallpaper to spruce up my computer. Here is a source for some very cool ones. http://innovativewallpapers.blogspot.com/