Month: March 2018

Marching in Lancaster

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

A couple of scenes from the Lancaster NH March For Our Lives (let it be noted that Lancaster, while the county seat for Coös County, only has a population of 3,507):

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“More Bears, Less Arms’

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“What Can You Hunt With an AR-15?”

Be it noted:  I’m not against guns.  Hell, I’m from Texas; my Daddy owned guns.  And I live in a part of New Hampshire where the question “Got your deer yet?” isn’t an invitation to an act of performative masculinity, it’s a serious inquiry into the state of somebody’s winter larder.  Fifty or sixty pounds of venison in the freezer is a not-inconsiderable number of meals you don’t have to pay for at the local grocery.  If you want to shoot a deer with a proper deer rifle during the proper hunting season while in the possession of a proper hunting license, I’m right there with you, and if you’ve got any venison to give away, I’ll happily take some and eat it with pleasure.

It’s gun violence that I’m not in favor of.

From the Department of Exceedingly Mixed Metaphors

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Here’s Forbes Magazine – which really ought to know better – in the midst of an otherwise unexceptional article about the impact of the mega-success of Black Panther on the movie industry’s current reliance on producing a year-round series of blockbusters:

This is an entire pre-summer slate of would-be event movies getting steamrolled by one very big tentpole.

Squint a little with your mind’s eye, if you can, and try to picture what would you would be seeing, if this were a literal image.

Right. You’ve got a chalkboard getting squished by a support pole (I’ll even make it easier for you by assuming a circus-tent-sized wooden mast, rather than a flimsy aluminum pup-tent sort of thing) attached in some fashion to a piece of heavy road equipment. Which puts us squarely in Toon Town, if it puts us any place at all.

The moral of the story, if there is one: If you’re going to commit metaphor, for goodness’s sake take moment to visualize the whole thing first

A Sonnet

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My spouse and co-author waxes poetic.

JAMES D. MACDONALD

While streaking in my rocket ship through space,
Galactic empires seeking to destroy,
Subsonic signals hailed me with “Ahoy!
O spaceman launched from secret lunar base!
Turn back your craft at once!”  Sour was my face.
Switched off the signal; turned then to deploy
My proton missiles. With those I’d annoy
The surreptitious foes who’d marked my place.
When of a sudden, standing at my side,
A bearded wizard with a staff of flame
First tripped me, then, whilst stroking his goatee,
Gazed downward, as he called me by my name.
Quoth he, “Soft! Stay thy vaunted techno-pride:
This is not Sci-fi but a Fantasy.”

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Hugo Nominations Close Today

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I’ll admit to a certain amount of partisan rooting interest, here, since the No Story Is Sacred crew are, in fact, my own offspring:

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I Don’t Know What the Weather Is Doing Where You Are

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But where I am, in far northern New Hampshire, it’s snowing.  Again.

We’re under a winter storm warning until 2AM, and it’s been snowing with steady determination since mid-morning. And even after the storm warning has passed, the weather forecast is still calling for snow every day until the weekend.

To which I can only say, “Enough, already!”

This is the sort of weather that takes all of my get-up-and-go and stuffs it into a sack and throws it into a snowbank.

But I have editing jobs to work on, so once more into the breach . . . .

For Your Amusement

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Found elsewhere on the web:  Winnie-the-Pooh Noir.

Meanwhile, it’s domain-renewal time again for the Doyle and Macdonald web site, where there can be found links to all sorts of things, including sample chapters from most of our novels and a contact link for our agent, plus a lot of other stuff.  Donations toward its upkeep – because web hosting doesn’t come for free – can be made via the Buy Me a Coffee link in the sidebar here.