Tag Archives: creative

A Bit of Truth Behind the Fiction

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Baby Eagle

Baby Eagle

I had lived in New Hampshire for a little over a year.  I was having job issues and wasn’t sure what was happening in the near term.  I took walks and they became longer and longer every day.

One day as I was walking through the woods I heard an awful, pitiful cry.  A large white pine was straight in front of my, the trail turn as it reached it.  High above the trail there was a large bird on a branch with another large bird a bit above it on another branch.  I couldn’t tell what they were, but my thought was immature bald eagles.  They were huge.  Between the two birds was a squirrel.  The squirrel was screaming at the birds.  He obviously wasn’t ready to be bird food quite yet.  As i approached one of the birds flew off.  Not wanting to upset the balance of nature I quickly walked on.  For the next few months I looked for that bird every time I walked by that tree.  After two or three months I moved and have never been back to that trail (moved to a different part of the same town). Continue reading →

Effect and Cause

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The Insistance of Time

So, why does time flow in one direction only, why doesn’t it go the other way?  There is nothing in the equations that describe how the universe works that says time has to have an arrow.  Typically what is time’s arrow is justified by cause and effect and by the lack of reversibility.

You drop a plate on the floor and it shatters.  The plate hitting the floor is the cause of the shattering, the plate falling is the cause of it hitting the floor and a combination of you dropping it and gravity is the cause of it falling.  Cause and effect and the idea that it can’t go backwards gives time its direction.  The “flowing backwards” part, you know, the plate spontaneously reassembling and jumping up to your hand, in physics is part of entropy.  The universe has a tendency to become more random, less structured.  It can be reversed in a location by adding energy, but you can’t add anything to the Universe as a whole, so entropy increases, i.e., time marches on.

But what about those bundles of reverse entropy called “humans”? Continue reading →

Just What I’ve Been Waiting For

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Stars

A few years back I wrote a handful of strange prog-rock tunes.  I had been composing classical music for years and was doing a switch-over to more popular music.  I played some tunes for a friend.  She gave me a weird look and asked, “Who’s your target audience?”  What?  I wrote the music I wanted to hear.

“Fine,” she said.  “If you want to go on writing music for yourself and playing it for friends and family the rest of your life, OK.  If you want to go beyond that you need to define a target audience.  You need to study the music they listen to and write something like that.”

The same thing happened when I started cranking out more fiction.  Who is the target audience?  What genre are you in?  OK, after writing The Fireborn, which is an urban fantasy, I read a lot of urban fantasy.  Hmm.  I like some, some I don’t and some is OK, but none of it is anything like The Fireborn.  The Fireborn is sort of like if Douglas Adams decided to write an Indiana Jones story in Dirk Gently’s universe and then had it rewritten by Stephen King.  I’m not saying it’s of the caliber of their stories, I’m saying that is where it would fit in the Universe of books.  So what is that called and who writes like that? Continue reading →

I am

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Trent Grin

I am
A pioneer to nowhere
On the cutting edge that passed by
I forge my own path
Even if it’s a well-worn trail

I am
An experimenter in sound
And maker of noise
From creating new classical
To the latest old-school toys

I am
A Wordsmith, bending and shaping
Nouns to swords, verbs to ploughshares
Sowing the air with ideas
A creator of worlds

I am
A manipulator of light
Collecting it with a lens
Changing it with pencils, computer and pens
A recorder, creator of art for sight

I am
A child on a globe-sized playground
Beach, mountain, city and farm
The world is there to be explored
To wonder at and to experience Continue reading →