What's on my mind?

I bookmark and save a lot of news articles to talk about with friends and family, and I sometimes link them here on my website. I thought I'd give readers a chance to see what's been making the rounds on my table lately for reading/thinking.

Iran blaming Google and Twitter for corrupting their youth.

We Have More To Offer. Classic humor from German politicians. Too bad everyone has to be so up-tight.

Asian woman caned (see flogged) for drinking a beer in Malaysia. Are we living in the 21st century or back in the stone-ages when women didn't have equal rights?

Those are the three "hot topics" on my mind lately. In addition, I've been looking into experimenting/further refining my personal style for fiction. I've been dabbling quite a bit, and I think my personal style is a cross between third person limited and stream of consciousness narrative. To-date I've written a few first-person shorts (which Evy says are my best pieces), and while I enjoy writing short fiction in first-person, I just don't see myself writing a novel from that perspective. Unless it's a stand-alone, perhaps. As far as the fiction series (I've refined the 5 book outline down to 4 books) that I'm working on first, I am largely doing this as a "testing" ground to refine my personal style, learn how to properly create/define/write characters, plot elements, and so on and so forth, without worrying too much about whether or not I become a best-seller. I'm doing this primarily for a paycheck, true, but to be honest, my freelance work is paying the bills, and I'm fine with that for as long as it takes to refine myself into a sellable fiction writer. A few short stories sales do not a fiction writer make, and I've got a lot of refining to do. To that end, I'm ordering some new books in September to further research my personal style and tailor my writing a bit further as I begin to (finally!) make more progress on the book after so many months off. I started working through the first 11 chapters yesterday, and I've been making some small edits and getting ready to start on chapter 12, finally. I'm just over 70k words in right now, and the outline calls for 30 chapters, or around 200k words. Still a *lot* of work to get done by Christmas. Then there's edits, revisions....

That's the mid-week blurb.