Richard Freeborn

Fiction and Non-Fiction

Author: Richard Freeborn (Page 7 of 14)

Sisters in Arms is now available

March 25, 2024 /

A short post this week to let everyone know Sisters in Arms is now available at all eBook retailers.

Women who put it all on the line when the shit hits the fan. Military, family, or thrown together by chance doesn’t matter. They join, they cooperate, and, when they run out of options, they fight.
Tales from feudal Japan to modern day Angola. A slink through the Parisien woods and a strut along the Seattle streets. A Babylon that we never knew to a war-torn hell we should all fear.
A baker’s dozen of stories about women owning their place in the world.

Sisters-in-Arms | Universal Book Links Help You Find Books at Your Favorite Store!

Ingenious Persistence

March 18, 2024 /

About this time last year, we returned from a trip to discover a pair of birds had nested on the blades of a fan on our patio. The nest was well established and one of the birds looked very comfortable, presumably keeping eggs warm.

I never managed to identify the birds, but the eggs hatched and we had three babies poking their heads up and cheeping urgently.

Unfortunately, we then had three days of rain, thunder, and high winds. The parents couldn’t get to the nest, and the chicks died. I also learned that sudden and loud noises can kill birds that young. And we had loud noises. My neighbor is still trying to fix electrical and plumbing issues after a lightning strike!

When it was clear the chicks were dead, and the parents weren’t returning, I removed the fan blade, and laid the birds to rest on an east facing slope.

This February, as we prepared to make a trip, I decided we didn’t need a repeat of last year, secured bird repellent spikes to the fan blades, and off we went.

We had been back about a week when I noticed a pair of birds ducking in and out under the roof toward the fan. Waste of your time, I told them smugly. And then I looked, really looked at the fan blades.

You guessed it. I had left about a six inch gap between the fan housing and the start of the spikes, and that was enough for the birds – I think they are finches – to build their new home. I don’t think they’ve laid eggs yet, but I am going to keep my fingers crossed we don’t have a repeat of last year’s rain and thunder.

Next year? I’m still working on that plan.

Change for the sake of Change

March 11, 2024 /

Have you had those nagging little pop-ups and messages from Dropbox?

They started with me last week. First about upgrading to the next level, and secondly performing a reinstall for the new version of Dropbox. I ignored the first as I’m barely using half of my current space allocation. I did accept the second, and then the fun began.

Dropbox shut down and went through the usual install and relaunch cycle I expect when installing new versions of applications on the Mac. This time there was a wrinkle. I got the message Dropbox was moving my files to a “secure” location.

What? Where?

Previously the Dropbox folder was located in my Documents folder, and now appears in Finder under the Locations heading. No indication of where, if anywhere, it resides on the hard drive and all you see in Get Info is Dropbox. Not exactly helpful.

Fortunately my technical skills haven’t completely rusted away, so it was into Terminal. A search through the hard drive found Dropbox and all my files in the folder Library -> Cloud Storage.

Satisfied, I had my files somewhere I could find them, I forgot about it until I accessed one of those files. I think it was a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet. At that point I got a warning message and the request to allow the application to access Dropbox files. And this has been a consistent event when I first open a file for the first time in the new Dropbox structure. Grrr!!!

I expect there’s a reason for this change, but it would be nice if Dropbox explained what they were changing and why the need to move all files to some obscure location.

Or it might be some tech-weeny’s bright idea of cool where no-one thought to question the consequences.

A Quick Update

March 4, 2024 /

For those of you who supported the Thrill Ride kickstarter, a big thank you from me, and implied from everyone else with stories in this year’s issues. The kickstarter funded, so expect to see the first issue – Sisters in Arms – within the next few weeks. This issue includes my story A Cousin’s Outing.

It’s been a while since I submitted anything to the top science fiction magazines, but I have stories under consideration at Asimov’s and Analog. Unfortunately at the moment Fantasy and Science Fiction isn’t accepting submissions, but when they open again, there will be several stories in the queue for them.

Elsewhere, I’m making good progress on the third Jacob and Miriam story, and that’s on track for publication at some time in the second quarter of 2024. More news on that closer to the publication date.

A New Approach

February 19, 2024 /

This past week my writing study and reading intersected in a way I didn’t expect.

I’m coming to the end of a nine-week class on dialog, and wow, has it been illuminating. In parallel, one of the fiction books I was reading was Beyond – the first of Mercedes Lackey’s trilogy about the founding of Valdemar.

I enjoyed the book but something felt off, and not quite right. I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. Not then, but later when I finished working through the lectures on the dialog class, I had a glimmer of an idea.

This week’s topic was narration, and how a writer can use it to give the reader information, and to paraphrase, there’s light narration, heavy narration, journal narration, and whole book narration. The assignment was to find examples of each type.

And there was my answer. Beyond isn’t just heavy narration, the whole book is mostly narration, and that was what disturbed me.

The thing with whole book narration is it tends to keep the reader at a distance, and I wasn’t expecting that from Mercedes Lackey. When you read the other Valdemar books you are deep inside the character’s head feeling their thoughts and emotions, and I kept waiting for that in Beyond.

I read the book almost in one sitting and know I’ll go back and read it again, so although I wasn’t expecting this approach, I suspect the next book in the series – Into the West – will have the same style.

This time I’ll be ready for it. And probably read the book in one session.

Another Upgrade

February 13, 2024 /

Back in July of last year (System Upgrades – Richard Freeborn), I detailed the results of changing out our router and the improvements we had as a result.

Since then, I’ve been working around increasing issues with my MacBook Pro. The speakers died some time ago, and plugging in an external speaker wasn’t too much of an issue, especially as the general sound quality was much better.

The track pad and bluetooth were another problem. The track pad developed a mind of its own, sending the cursor all over the screen, or just not responding. That meant a separate wireless mouse. Again, not a big problem. What did bother me more is that the bluetooth keyboard would for no reason stop working. When I investigated further the MacBook had turned off Bluetooth, and the only way to get it back was to shut down and restart.

And then there were the software updates. About a month ago, Microsoft informed me they couldn’t upgrade Word and Excel because the operating system was too old. Can’t be, was my first thought, and then I did some research.

The MacBook Pro was nine years old, which explained the pieces failing every so often. I really didn’t really want to buy more hardware at the moment, but hardware has a mind of its own, so I was back at the Apple store looking at options.

My first thought was an iMac, but it looked to be older Apple technology. I didn’t want to bite that hook, and a few months later see the release of a whole new iteration. I’ve experimented with using the iPad on travel trips, and it works well, so I didn’t see the point in another laptop, which led me to the Mac Mini.

The immediate drawback appeared to be no keyboard, mouse, or monitor. Wait – I’ve already added those onto the laptop, and one thing we have in the house is plenty of spare monitors. No camera? Again, we have those sitting on a shelf not being used. So I ordered the Mac Mini. It arrived two days earlier than scheduled and as soon as I plugged in the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, it asked me if I wanted to connect to another Apple device and copy from that.

Now, Apple has tricked me before this way with my iPad, but I was prepared to give it a try, and surprisingly the Mac Book and Mini talked to each other and about five hours later everything was up and running on the Mini. I had some problems with license counts on some applications, and the Mac Book Pro NTFS app doesn’t work with the Apple M2 chip. Both took a little time but were easily resolved.

Total time to upgrade and iron out the kinks? Less than a day. It’s the easiest upgrade I’ve ever done.

Meaningless Error Messages

February 5, 2024 /

This past weekend was a catch up on the many admin tasks put aside while we were out of town for most of January. One of those catch up activities is to scan and shred documents. I moved to electronic storage for copies of bills and invoices about ten years ago and managed to retire and remove a full four-drawer filing cabinet.

Despite this, and having multiple backups, both on a physical hard drive and in the cloud, I still keep hard copies of some documents – contracts, and the final versions of manuscripts spring to mind immediately.

As you’re probably suspecting, there was quite a pile of paper to scan, and as I got through the pile, the Epson printer/scanner barfed. That’s not unusual as pages get caught and jammed every so often. This was different though. There was no paper jam icon. Instead I had an Epson error 100069 and a message telling me to restart the printer. Easy enough, and for good measure, I checked nothing was caught in the scanner feed.

Restarting went straight to the same error message and a suggestion to contact Epson technical support. So straight to the browser and a search, and a discovery.

There is nothing on the Epson site that acknowledges printer error messages, let alone a list of what they might be, and how to resolve them. Buried deep in the results of another search I found the title Epson’s triple secret error codes. Now that seemed promising.

And it was.

The 100069 message essentially means the scanning function has serious issues. It could be the scanner motor pulley (checked it and looked okay), or a failed scanner motor or scanner sensor or . . . Given the amount of scanning I do, my guess is it’s the sensor or motor, which almost certainly means a new printer.

I don’t begrudge the cost of the new printer (actually, yes I do 🙂 ). What does frustrate me is how hard it was to diagnose the problem. I love the printer, and will replace like with like, but come on Epson, you’re better than this.

A Busy Few Weeks

January 29, 2024 /

It’s funny how often after a long stretch of nothing apparently happening, everything seems to coalesce together and there’s a flurry of frenetic activity.

That’s how it’s been this past week, and probably how it will continue into the coming week.

Firstly, two of my stories were selected for the 2024 issues of Thrill Ride Magazine so there were edits and proofing copy in preparation for the upcoming kickstarter which starts on Tuesday 30th – Thrill Ride – the magazine (Year Two) by M. L. “Matt” Buchman — Kickstarter. There are some excellent writers in this year’s magazine, as there were in Year One, and I’m grateful to be included alongside them.

Secondly, I finally finished the editing and formatting of Death at a Wedding and got everything published, along with the reformatting of the cover for Thieves in the Temple. Both books now look like they belong together. Check out Death at a Wedding here: Death at a Wedding

And finally, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine confirmed my Jacob story The Cleansing of Abel will be in the May/June issue available in April.

It’s been a great start to the year and I can’t wait to see what comes in February.

All in the Mind

January 23, 2024 /

Over the past week I’ve written two short stories with the intent of exploring a new science fiction world. I was reasonably happy with the first one, but something didn’t feel right about the second one.

That second story was a murder mystery and I laid out the death, the suspects, and the resolution. The story ended up being a little shorter than I expected, but that wasn’t what bothered me. If I’ve learned one big thing in the past few years, it’s that a story will be as long as it needs to be. There have been multiple occasions where a story I thought would be about 3,500 words ended up being nearly 5,000. And some I thought would be 6,000 words ended up at 3,000!

I had someone read the story, Someone with much much more experience thanI have, and whose opinion I respect. Good writing they said, but you lost me when I realized there was no setting.

Wham! Nailed it in one!

When I reread the story, I knew exactly what they meant, and I realized why the story ended up that way. I had a vision for the location and setting – a tropical beach on a planet somewhere in the Milky Way – but I didn’t see it. For example, as I was writing, I didn’t have a feel for what the restaurant looked like, how the tables were set, the attitude of the wait staff, the views from the windows, the smells coming out of the kitchen. All those little things that make the story real for the reader.

I thought about the story a lot during my walks this past weekend. I still like the premise of the mystery, and the implied potential for other stories in that same world. I’m thinking I’ll write the story again, from a different character viewpoint, and see what happens to it. It will be a month or two as first, I have a novel to finish.

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