Musings of Two Creative Minds

When it comes to being thankful my first thought every day is about having Helen in my life.  She's  my wife, my heart's desire, my collaborator, and especially my best friend.   But I have many other things I am grateful for starting with the day I was brought to Joyce and Gerard Krummenacker as a foster baby (the only one they ever kept), to this moment here before my computer.  Perhaps someday I'll share more of those personal tales, but on this day I simply want to focus on the past year.  In October of 2016, I got the call for an interview with the County of Santa Cruz and a week later I was offered the job.  I was still attending classes at CSU Monterey Bay at the time and had to sacrifice my GPA by going down in flames in two of them gradewise.  I could have simply dropped those classes but at the time we were living in campus subsidized housing and I was under the  impression that I still had to be a full-time student to...

Yesterday I had an epiphany about my writing and the entire Para-Earth Series... it's been a collaboration all along.  From "The Bridge" to "The Ship" to "The Vampyre Blogs -Coming Home", the entire journey has been one gigantic collaboration with my wife/best friend Helen.  And I am planning on putting her name on the first two books.   Why didn't I do this sooner?  And how did I not realize it was a collaboration all along?  Because I thought a collaboration strictly meant two people were doing the actual writing, but that's not the only way a collaboration works.  Ideas, suggestions, helping shape characters, plot, settings, events... all of that goes into a collaboration as well.   So even though I did all the writing in "The Bridge" and "The Ship", Helen gave me so much guidance like helping shape the characters personalities, questioning their actions, being my sounding-board for ideas I had but didn't...

    I'm letting one of my co-authors take the helm here at the blog today.  So allow me to introduce one of my oldest friends and partner-in-crime Rich Caminiti, as he shares with you his own wisdom about writing on a budget.  Take it away, Rich...     Welcome my friends, and thank you to Allan for letting me write my piece for you. In his last musing, he spoke of his computer woes not only about his desktop but his laptop as well.       Well, I too seem to have shared the same fate. But wait, I'm getting to my point! I had to wait and pick up a new laptop which some of you may have seen my post about setting it up. (To a computer technician, to get this perfected to our satisfaction takes forever!)      When Allan needed Microsoft Office I surmise and Helen had told him about WPS Office which cost him nothing. A very excellent deal! Five second ad and all.      I also told my cohort th...