Camera Familia — Chapter 2

In 1955, Mom began dating Alan Maury Razovsky — a second-generation immigrant Lithuanian Jew, born 1914 in St. Louis MO, more recently from Dallas, Texas, an electrical engineer at TVA where Mom worked.

** Flashback ** There were twelve Jews at UTexas Austin in 1935, where AMR got his engineering degree.

One of them ended up working in the New York City financial district — World Bank, or maybe Agency for International Development.

Continue reading “Camera Familia — Chapter 2”

Camera Familia — Chapter 1

Signalman Benjamin Franklin Dyer, United States Navy, the South Pacific, circa 1944.

I have Frank Dyer’s semaphore flag, his father’s shotgun, a war trophy Japanese rifle, an engineering handbook printed in 1934.

But I never knew my natural father. He died in July 1950 when I was five months old, heart stopped by a stray current traveling between an electric stove and a washing machine, in our kitchen on Mountain View Circle in Flintstone Georgia, far from the battlefield.

Continue reading “Camera Familia — Chapter 1”

Preview!

A wave of Italian emigration to Mexico in the late 1800s had left its mark on the village, particularly at the center. The church and courthouse, on opposite sides of the square, were Spanish. Everything else was Italianate except the band shelter — aluminum poles, sandbags, nylon ripstop roof, circa big-box warehouse store.

The sun descended below mountaintops, throwing shadows into valleys. Streetlamps blinked on. Shops lit signs. The town square came alive with hanging lights and illuminated fountains.

A gypsy jazz band from Hungary filed onstage; guitar, upright bass, clarinet, and a gym-bag percussionist equipped with snare drum, high-hat, washboard, block and cowbell.

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The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd

One thing you can always count on seeing in a Sci-Fi action show is flying objects. Architecture is no exception, and why would it be? The day after anti-gravity is developed, somebody will start building a flying house.

I built my first one in The Illusion of Gravity. According to the story’s hero Rivan Saraf, “The only large shapes Iron Arrow could form in those days were cylinders and spheres. So that’s what you got when you ordered a flying house — a flattened tube fused to a flattened sphere.”

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📝 Manuscript Assessment Criteria ☑️

Notes and Treats As a printable tabulated form or checklist, the Manuscript Assessment Criteria presented by SoundEagle🦅 below can assist writers in evaluating and inspecting their own works (either by themselves or with a group of readers) before submitting their manuscripts to publishers, and also during successive edits after the previous submission(s) and before the […]

📝 Manuscript Assessment Criteria ☑️

Reblogged from SoundEagle. Insightful!

Hacked!

On October 16, an unknown person registered an Internet domain associated with a business I once owned, activated an obsolete email address, and used the credential to destroy my Facebook accounts.

What a shock that was and, as you can imagine, Facebook doesn’t seem to care.

So, I’m off Facebook, perhaps permanently.

Just for fun, imagining a world in which you cared about what I’m up to on a daily basis, where would you like to find a record of that? Instagram? TikTok? YouTube? Elsewhere?

In the meantime, find me on X at @johndyerwrites

Image by MV Studio MV from Pixabay

Ship in a Bottle

It’s anyone’s guess how far this project will go. It could turn out to be a task better left uncompleted, at which point a loss of interest will be prudent. But, in the meantime, construction of my Loyal House 3D model is entering its third year and progress is being made.

I have not had my nose to the grindstone. The Blender file has languished since production of cover art for Ghosts of Ancient Vidura.

But, with an unfinished novel advancing toward publication, an author’s thoughts naturally turn to matters of self-promotion. One-minute video clips. Drama. Suspense. Spectacle. Better, perhaps, than the last time I tried it.

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