ministry of writing

Snelgorb liked wind. He liked the feel of it on his scaly skin. He liked the way it tickled behind his horns and along the ridges on the back of his head. He liked things that made wind, too. As a youngling, he loved to just spin his sling around and around in front of […]

All the chefs at Animulus were highly trained professionals. Culinary experts. Nothing less than the best, the brightest, the most talented culinary artists in the world. For the privacy of their patrons, only one party per night was served. Plates were not infrequently thousands of US dollars. And the waiting list was months long. Everyone […]

“Hello. Hell-o. Helllooooooo.” She was never good at small talk. Simply saying simple words of greeting felt like a waste of time. It’s implied that she was addressing them, right? People get that, right? “Hello. Hi. How are you.” The words feel unnatural on her tongue. Practice makes perfect. Or something. That’s what they say. […]

Crisp air fills my nostrils and I open my eyes to whiteness. Temporarily blinded by the sun overhead, I rub the dust and grime from my eyes, feel the dryness in my nose and on my lips as I look around to gather my bearings. The flat, parched desert expands all around me, broken up […]

If you asked me a year ago who Chris Lema was, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. My experience up to that point was a brief mention by my friend Josh at Event Espresso that his was a blog worth reading. Chris tweets a lot — one of my biggest turn-offs when I am […]

Close to 8,000 words on my story-thing…when I hit 30k or so, I’ll stop calling it a “thing”…

6000 words down.  44,000 (give or take) to go…

A while ago I wrote about slowing down.  What could be slower than a few days camping in the desert?  No internet, the phones died our second night there, nothing to actively distract or divert.  In my last post, I wrote that I hoped the process of slowing down my internet (and media) consumption would […]

I was working on a WordPress plugin today that will allow users/developers to stop a javascript from running on a particular page.  That doesn’t sound very exciting, but it got me thinking about the WordPress adage “code is poetry”.  (Blame this on my recent initiative for going slow — I had this idea when I […]

This year, I participated in WordPress.com’s Post a Week Challenge.  Well, how’d I do? I was using Joost de Valk‘s Blog Metrics plugin, but that only tells you how you’re doing overall and how you’ve done in the last 30 days and, while I could have logged how many posts there were on January 1 […]

A couple of years ago I found a book, The Illuminati by Larry Burkett.  I picked it up at a garage sale or a library book sale or maybe it was just lying out on the street.  It’s worn, heavily water-damaged, somewhat mildew-y and I thought that I would read it, you know, eventually.  I grabbed […]

One of the things that has been occupying my time the last couple weeks was my grandfather’s funeral, which was last Tuesday.  We drove out to California, visited family and got preparations ready, had a rosary (I’m a recovering Catholic) and then the funeral the next day.  I wrote a thing for the funeral, and […]