Did anyone see Elizabeth Rubin’s wonderful, heartbreaking article in this week’s New York Times Magazine? It deals with the Airborne fighting in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, trying to do a job that has already defeated the Marines and the 10th Mountain Division. It’s got every element of military tragedy you can imagine. A poorly conceived mission. […]

My current audio book is The Religion by Tim Willocks, a big sprawling action/romance set in and around the siege of Malta in 1565. If you haven’t read it, you might think of it as a sort of overlarge Bernard Cornwell book with a better vocabulary and a wider fictional range. There’s a lot of […]

Last night we had our monthly meeting of Critical Mass, our local workshop. Usually our critiques tend to be a bit rambling and tentative, or at least mine do, but last night’s most incisive crit came from new writer (and my former Clarion student) Ian Tregillis. I reconstruct it as best as I can:“If I’m […]

Back in December I posted about Air Force Cyberspace Command. Now we know more about it. 5-10,000 people. $2 billion budget. California, Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, and New Mexico are competing for the headquarters. (If New Mexico can’t have it, I’m rooting for Louisiana. But New Mexico really needs to have it. We haven’t won a […]