I have a rule against tearing down other people’s creations in public. I appreciate the hard work that any creator puts into their work, and I prefer to encourage that rather than crush their dreams in front of others. Even bestselling authors are people–I count several as friends–and just because someone’s successful doesn’t mean insults don’t hurt them. I make …

Over at his website, Chuck Wendig’s been writing a lot about the pirating of ebooks, and he declared today to be Please Don’t Pirate My Book Day, asking authors to pitch in a post about the subject. So here’s mine. I don’t worry about piracy all that much. I want people to pay for my work, but I don’t tear …

My fellow Alliterate and friend Steve Sullivan has a heartbreaking post about friends in the Philippines who lost their baby. That’s hard enough, but the hospital is refusing to release the baby’s body for burial until the bills for her care are paid. I know, it sounds like an e-mail scam–too terrible to be true–but Steve personally vouches for the …

After reading a few different points of view on why a national political campaign feels safe disparaging gamers, I stumbled across one idea that rings true. It’s not an accident. It’s not Goldfarb being flip. He did it once and gave a clever apology, then did it again a month later. I’m going to assume he’s a smart guy who …

Michael Goldfarb, an aide to John McCain, recently wrote a blog post about the flap over whether or not McCain stole his “cross in the dirt” anecdote from legendary author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. While trying to make his point that the similarities between the stories are perfectly plausible, he writes: It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage …

If you keep up with the news, you probably know that Congress recently approved a bill that allows for the revocation of habeas corpus and permits the President to define what constitutes torture, among other things. I don’t want to turn this website into a political forum, but let’s say I’m less than comfortable with this. A good friend of …

This story’s a bit old, but I’m just now getting around to poking into it. On April 12, a couple that claimed to have given birth to sextuplets admitted that it had all been a hoax. As the father of quadruplets, I’m not surprised that someone tried this kind of a scam. People ask us all the time “what did …

The Stateline News, a free weekly newspaper published here in Beloit, ran a “People You Know” article about me in the Sunday (12/31/05) edition. If you’re a local, you already have it. If not, my apologies, but there’s no web link to any such piece. Mostly, I’m happy with it. I always appreciate free publicity, even in a publication with …

I don’t normally post links to this kind of stuff, but since it involves a game designer getting ripped off by a large corporation, I just can’t help it. Apparently whoever programs the Fuddruckers website hotlinked to a Flash-based version of a game called Burgertime hosted on the author’s own website. They didn’t even bother to swipe the code, just …