Joe Beernink
Author of NOWHERE WILD, NOWHERE HOME
Monthly Archives: October 2012
Apparently, the weather on the west coast is jealous of all the attention Sandy is generating for the east coast. It’s decided to drop a few million gallons from the skies over the Pacific Northwest, thanks to the Pineapple Express. But just a couple of minutes before the skies opened up, I grabbed this shot of my favorite tree in the backyard. It’s positively luminescent against the darkening skies to the southwest.
Last year I read, and thoroughly enjoyed Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel Ship Breaker. It set a new standard for YA Fiction for me, and raised the bar for my own writing. The Drowned Cities is the second book set in the world we crawled into in Ship Breaker. Global warming has inundated the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. The cities are under water, and home to the militias that still fight to… Read More
Yesterday, my kids’ class took a trip to a pumpkin patch. My mom (who is in town for a few days) and I, tagged along. I couldn’t walk very far, but I did get a few before and after pictures, on a very rainy afternoon. After the outing, we returned home, heated up some apple cider, made some popcorn, and watched a movie. Not a bad way to spend a Friday afternoon.
Today, I am proud (and a little nervous) to announce that I have joined the ranks of the “small business owners”, with the launch of Devscape Consulting, LLC. Devscape Consulting will provide technical writing and software development consulting services to clients looking for assistance a few hours per week, or per month, or as needed. For details on what we do at Devscape Consulting, I ask you to take a look at… Read More
Fall is my favorite season for many reasons—one of which is the tree in our backyard turns a lovely shade of red. And on a completely different arboreal note, last winter, we had a massive ice storm that just devastated the trees around here, in particular, a Japanese Maple in front of our house. But with a little pruning, trees can be rather miraculous healers. This is what that poor little tree… Read More
Recently, it has come to my attention that I have been missing out on some great music by the wonderfully talented, Emm Gryner. I should have known about Emm, since I rode the school bus with her and her brothers Tony and Frank to grade school every day for years. But, for some reason, I lost track of many of my elementary school classmates until very recently. Turns out that Emm has… Read More
Every fall, we have a family cider-fest out at my father-in-law’s orchard in Eastern Washington. This year, our two day total press was somewhere around 60 gallons. We also made vats of apple sauce, a pot of apple butter, two large pans of apple crisp, and racks of dried apples. I wasn’t able to do much myself this year due to all my injuries and ailments, but I was an awesome supervisor… Read More
Back in January, before I got sick, I started a series of blog posts called The Writing Muse. You can read the first two by following these links: Dreams and Fear. Today, in the matter of half an hour, I outlined an entire new book, inspired by a few connected events from the past few days. That led me to consider a new muse: Pain and Illness. See, on Monday, while I… Read More
Homer Hickam is probably best known for authoring the book Rocket Boys, which was made into the 1999 movie, October Sky starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Hickam is the son a coal miner who built rockets as a teenager, and grew up to be an engineer at NASA. Crater is a mesh of Hickam’s mining past, and an interesting take on the future of living in space, as seen through the eyes of Crater… Read More
Joe Beernink 