SELECT * FROM Shane

In my daily lunchtime-wasting internet crawl today, I stumbled across an interview with Robin Hobb, bestselling author of (among other series) the Assassin’s Apprentice Trilogy, which I own, signed by her, and of which I have read the first volume.

Although interviews asking writers how they find the time to write are a-dime-a-dozen, I haven’t really read one since it became a real issue for me. Since starting full-time work, and getting married and starting a family, basically. And it really hit home this time. With my life destined only to get even more full of non-writing activity, I’ve begun to realise that it would be all too easy to just stop writing, and never pick it back up again.

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It’s February 4 today.

Which means the baby is two days late.

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In 2007, the hotly anticipated Star Wars video game The Force Unleashed debuted its epic trailer at that year’s E3 convention. This trailer’s most notable feature was the amazing and dramatic footage of an anonymous Force-wielding character bringing a huge Star Destroyer crashing to the ground using only the Force.

It definitely impressed me, and I made a mental note that I was going to play this game.

I recently had a chance to play a version of this game that included this mission (previously, I had played the Wii version, which was cool because you got to wave the wand like a lightsaber and things like Force Push actually required a push action, but the Star Destroyer battle was omitted), and found myself immediately in two minds about it.

While I don’t think this battle was the unmitigated disaster that so many people on the internet seem to have written it off as, it wasn’t the jaw-dropping teeth-clenching awe-inspiring life-defining battle it had been built up as. Here are a few reasons why.

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So, it’s January 29, and only four days until Katie’s due date. Which means that the baby could be here any day now.

I have already posted about my anxieties about the upcoming birth and aftermath, and have been writing pretty extensively about my excitement in the baby’s diary, which will be gifted to her when she can read. So I won’t go into any of that here. Instead, I have decided to post a picture that shows Katie at 39 1/2 weeks, absolutely glowing.

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As the New Year broke, I found a news article that offered some insight into what this decade would have to offer. And guess what: it was more of the same. The latest example of misdirected political correctness is the republication of Joseph Conrad’s 1897 novel The Nigger of the Narcissus as The N-word of the Narcissus.

I’m not kidding. This is true. There’s a news article about it and everything.

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