So What Have I Been Up To? The legal wranging up in Wisconsin is still eating a lot of my writing time, but I have gotten a little writing done.  I wrote a few more chapters on Bear Country and went through tightening it up.  It's amazing how much of a difference a good line edit can make to a story.  I also went to the Writer's Conference at Green Lake and wrote a few things there, mostly non-science fiction and mostly fragments.  You'll see a few of those things in this issue.

 I also reorganized a lot of my older writing and found a couple of stories I put quite a bit of work on but either didn't finish or didn't polish.  I'm getting back to some of them and seeing quite a bit of potential.  You may see a couple of those stories in this issue.  I'm also working on a series of scenarios based on little-known, but important wars of the twentieth century.  Hopefully one or two of them will make it into this issue or the next one.

I've also gotten deeper into a couple of interests of mine: solar cells and computers.  I'm getting up to speed in Linux and computer graphics.  You'll see some signs of those interests in this issue.  

I've spent a lot of time learning to use Gimp (sort of Linux's answer to Photoshop--I can't afford to keep upgrading Photoshop and for my amateur purposes the latest version of Gimp is better than my old version of Photoshop).  Don't necessarily trust any pictures or the text directly referring to those picture you see me post.

Note From April 2007: I didn't post this for several months because with the limited time available to me I just couldn't afford to struggle with getting it onto AOL.  Finally I just decided to post it somewhere else (gather.com) and link to the articles from here.  It takes minutes rathers than hours, and I can afford mintues. 

Fair warning, the articles you link to won't look like the ones I've been posting here because I'm just dumping the text to the articles on gather.com rather than actually designing a website.  To get back here, just click the back arrow key.  When I get time I'll fix the navigation system so it is more intuitive.  One advantage of having the articles on gather.com is that you can comment on them if you are a gather members. 

You don't  have to be a gather member to read the articles, so do feel free to visit them.