Bubble and Squeek for 8 May 2025

I was out to lunch with a friend of mine recently and we got to talking about how bad the dogwood was this time of year. I told him the story of the first time I’d seen dogwood. There I was, walking down a Microsoft hallway that had a window at the end and I swore it looked like it was snow—heavily. I couldn’t believe it. I stopped at the window and watched. It overlooked a protected courtyard and the grass was white beneath me. I didn’t know what I was looking at and all I could think of was snow. No one else was reacting to this at all. My first thought, “Am I crazy? Am I the only one who is seeing this?” Then I realized it was snow but something like industrial strength dandelion fluff. My second thought, and I kid you not, was, “Are we being...

Today’s Tell Me is from my friend and peer, Bryan Young. He talks about a truism in novel writing that is rarely spoken about. Also, he talks about another love of mine…James Bond novels. The thing about writing novels is that you can’t just learn to write novels, you have to learn to write that novel, and BattleTech: VoidBreaker is definitely a novel I had to learn new things for as I was preparing to write it and while I was writing. That’s one of the things I love about writing, though, to stretch my skills and push myself. I love setting out to write a novel by trying to push myself. When I initially spitballed the story for VoidBreaker with Ray Arrastia (the line developer for BattleTech) at our creative summit, I got really excited because I realized the sort of story we’d be telling was essentially a spy...