Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

I did my best to hide from election news yesterday, but modern technology can be both persuasive and insistent. There was good news to be had, for sure - the Democrats took back the House, so yay, we're not going to go full-on fascist. But for me, there was a lot of disappointment, too. If, as Jim Wallis at Sojourners said, the election was a referendum on white nationalism, then large chunks of the country just told us they're okay with it. The possibility that they simply don't know who Trump is and what he stands for is no longer credible. Not after the campaign run-up we've seen these past few weeks. And yet, the first thing I noticed in the early polling results yesterday was that the Trumpy parts of the country were getting Trumpier. They weren't running away from Trump. They were running toward him. And the most discouraging thing to me was watching my home state of Indiana leading the charge. As the Midwestern states around it all started swingi...

Writing is hard. Writing well is harder, but so very worth it. I'm focused primarily on my biography series these days, but I have some fiction ideas that I think about when I get the chance. I've been reading some of my never-finished and unpublished work, too. Some of it is good, and makes me think I should go back to it sometime. The Eyes of the Enemy was put on hold twice, but still got finished and published. Maybe a couple of these other two stories can, too. But some of what I read makes me cringe, either at something I did that I've learned not to do or at something I did that I haven't figured out yet. And something else, too - it's made me realize how nearly two years in Trump's America have changed me. I'm a straight, white, cis-gendered man, and in America that means I'm the default setting. I could write every character as someone exactly like me, and that would be considered okay. And of course I've done that before. Whe...