Books by James Bow

New blog post! Have a read!

Wow. (The Green Party takes Kitchener Centre by-election with 48% of the vote) Wow. It looks like the Green Party took Kitchener Centre in the provincial by-election, defeating the NDP candidate who was a popular city councillor, and who was representing the party who'd held the seat last. The Greens appear to have...

New blog post! Have a read!

On Doctor Who's 2023 Children in Need Special, and Soft Reboots So, I was privileged to watch the recent Children in Need special mini-episode of Doctor Who, just in time for the show's sixtieth anniversary, and I realize now that it's been years since I've reviewed Who on this blog. So,...

New blog post! Have a read!

Silver Anniversary Twenty-five years ago from this moment, I was probably being ferried about, having photographs taken, and doing a whole bunch of other activities getting ready to walk down the aisle to get married to Erin. It is hard to believe...

New blog post! Have a read!

Announcing Tales from the Silence, My First Anthology The image on the left is not the official cover of the publication (though it might be nice if it were in that style). Instead, it was produced courtesy of the Pulo-o-Mizer! It has been close to twenty years since...

New blog post! Have a read!

Announcing The Sun Runners, My Sixth Published Novel. I'm pleased that The Sun Runners, my young adult science fiction novel set on Mercury, has found a home with Shadowpaw Press (the product page can be found here). The first elements of this story came to me in...

New blog post! Have a read!

Is There Anybody Out There? The image to the right is entitled Is There Anybody Out There, by Christian Kortum. It is used in accordance with his Creative Commons License. Congratulations to Wab Kinew who, this past Tuesday, made history not only as the first...

Is there anybody out there?

I’m finding social media is getting less relevant. Twitter is a dumpster fire that proud I convinced my workplace to vacate, and Facebook is hiding news from me (for instance, I didn’t realize Manitoba was having an election, much less that the NDP was winning it, until Andrew Gurudata made his post)

I’m more convinced than ever that it’s time to turn away from these corporate-backed systems. Mastodon is wide open and still good fun, and nobody can take my blog away. But, tellingly, my blog posts have little traction on Facebook. So, I’m asking, have you folks been seeing my posts? Will you still follow if I move back to regular blogging?

And, yes, I’ll make this into a blog post.

By James Bow My Books. My Thoughts. My Writing.

New blog post! Have a read!

The Future Belongs to Venus Today, we have a guest column from Mark Richard Francis. Actually, this is a piece that he wrote for me while he was making comments on one of my drafts of The Cloud Riders. We were discussing the details...

New blog post! Have a read!

The Future History of the Earth's Silence The above image is entitled Earth Over Moon - Apollo 17, and is by Kevin Gill. It's used in accordance with its Creative Commons licence. If and when The Sun Runners and The Cloud Riders get published, I'm hopeful...

New blog post! Have a read!

My Left Retina If you learn nothing else from my experience this past week, please take this advice: if you encounter oddities in your vision that look like large floaters, but act more like dead pixels, that actually occlude part of your vision,...

New blog post! Have a read!

On Canada I love my country. My country is flawed. Both these statements are true. We've muted our Canada Day celebrations these past few years in acknowledgement of the fact that we're built on a legacy which sadly includes dispossession and cultural...

New blog post! Have a read!

Video Creative Apropos of nothing, here are some videos that I've produced or helped produce over the past year. It's not writing, but it's still creative output I'm proud of. Have a watch!...

New blog post! Have a read!

My Father Drew Libraries for a Living A story from fifty years ago: My father told me about working for the Ontario Civil Service, specifically for the Ministry of Citizenship and Communications, which had the responsibility for funding and regulating the province's municipal library systems. It kept...

New blog post! Have a read!

Signs You Are Getting Old, #2,743 Some time ago, I don't recall exactly when (edited to add: I looked it up: it was in 2000), my family went to the theatre at Stratford and saw Paul Gross starring in William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Yes, Benton Frasier himself....

I don't like Mondays The federal government has just announced that it is spending over $300 million to buy the TTC electric buses and the infrastructure to power them. That's nice and all, and electric buses are cool, but with many TTC buses...

New blog post! Have a read!

I don't like Mondays The federal government has just announced that it is spending over $300 million to buy the TTC electric buses and the infrastructure to power them. That's nice and all, and electric buses are cool, but with many TTC buses...

New blog post! Have a read!

Spiders of Toronto It's heartening in this day and age to discover that the Internet can still surprise you in pleasant ways. I've been working on another educational book assignment during my off hours. This one is those high-interest publications for grade school...

New blog post! Have a read!

Stand by Me and Classic Culture So, one of the things that wrankles most about growing old is how much the pop culture of your childhood is turned into "classic" culture. It's like, for a GenXer, the music of Buddy Holly and the Beatles is...

New blog post! Have a read!

Creativity and Working Around Ablest Language Given that one of the novels I'm working on, The Sun Runners features a major character who becomes an amputee, I thought it wise to pay a sensitivity reader to look over my manuscript to ensure that I wasn't being...

New blog post! Have a read!

At the Mouth of the Grand For various reasons, we find ourselves in Port Maitland this week, holding a writing retreat on the shore of Lake Erie, beside the mouth of the Grand River. And, let me tell you, when you get to the mouth...

New blog post! Have a read!

Moynihan As I mentioned in my previous post, when visiting New York, I paid a visit to Grand Central Terminal, which is seen by many as the gold standard of landmark train stations. In the past, I've more often used...

New blog post! Have a read!

Grand Central Everybody knows how dense New York is, and how it towers, but I suspect people don't fully realize how big it also is. Case in point, I spent Sunday exploring the city, travelling on the PATH, the New York...

New blog post! Have a read!

Atlanta Turns out that, flying out from Pearson on Thursday evening, I left behind rapidly dropping temperatures and freezing rain that, frankly, should have caused a snow day in Kitchener-Waterloo. Fortunately, Erin called one on her own. I arrived in...

New blog post! Have a read!

The Last Gate I'm writing this at gate F99 at Pearson's Terminal 1. When you consider that Pearson's Terminal 1 has six general gates, running A to F, and that each gate is further subdivided into about a hundred individual boarding/deplaning points...

Twenty-One The above photo is of Erin looking over the South Dakota badlands, taken near I-90, on July 2, 2002, not too long after this blog started. Indeed, here's a blog post of the trip. What a difference twenty-one years...

New blog post! Have a read!

Twenty-One The above photo is of Erin looking over the South Dakota badlands, taken near I-90, on July 2, 2002, not too long after this blog started. Indeed, here's a blog post of the trip. What a difference twenty-one years...

New blog post! Have a read!

Snow Falling You just know the snow is serious when you get a knock on the door and you see three kids outside, bearing shovels. Still, you had to appreciate the industriousness of these kids, especially as they waited patiently as,...

New blog post! Have a read!

Waiting for the Train Kitchener Station, taken by me early on the morning of Wednesday, January 4, 2023....

New blog post! Have a read!

We Are Our Brothers' (and Sisters') Keepers. I'm probably flailing at straw men, here, but bear with me a moment. I've heard it said that some people say "Am I my brother's keeper?" when they argue against social programs, spending money to help people less fortunate than...

New blog post! Have a read!

On Train Service to Timmons and Weekend GO Service to Stratford Though I am loath to give the Doug Ford government the benefit of the doubt, I will give them credit when it's due, and the recent news of their purchase of new passenger equipment for the restoration of the...