Ian's Christmas Wish - A Flash Fiction

The fire crackled softly in the fireplace as a light snow fell outside the cabin. Each unique snowflake added to the thick white layer that had been falling all day. Through the windows, shades of gray and blue dominated the evening sky that was backlit by a full moon.

Inside the warmth of logs and timber, the flicker of candles fought against the coming darkness while casting shadows that slowly danced on the walls. I followed the candles to the kitchen and stopped briefly to watch the snowfall fade to just a few flakes. I offered up a quick pray of thanks for a beautiful evening.

Looking back to the main room, Sarina waited for me on the sofa. She caught me staring at her, admiring her brown curls and nerdy glasses. She smiled a soft smile and my heart melted. Over the last few months, we'd grown closer than I ever dared to dream. And there she was, waiting for me, smiling and happy to be with me. Just me.

In the kitchen, I struggled with the wine key and a bottle of Chardonnay. For whatever reasons, I always had trouble opening this particular brand. I had a moment of mild anxiety when I thought I was about to break the cork. I took my time and managed to get the whole thing out intact. I wanted this night to be special. I wanted it to be perfect.

It was Christmas eve and we were twenty miles from anywhere that was somewhere. I brought Sarina here because this place was special to me. She was the most special person in my life and I wanted to share the magic of the cabin on a Christmas Eve with her. My hope was the magic would rub off and she would answer yes to the question I had for her.

Back in the living room, Sarina smiled as I entered with the wine tray. Her hair hung naturally in loose curls down to her shoulders. She took off her glasses and set them on the end table as I offered her a glass of the Chardonnay.

"Oh, thank you," she said almost in a whisper. She took a sip and smiled again. "Chardonnay. My favorite. Are you up to something?"

"Me? Up to something? Maybe," I joked.

She laughed and scrunched her nose. To me she was adorable and I could be happy just drinking up the vision of her sitting smiling at me.

"Come here," she beckoned and held out the patchwork quilt she'd been wrapped in. "Keep me warm."

I tossed another log on the fire and sat down beside her. Sarina snuggled up close and we sipped our wine in the quiet of the cabin in the mountains.

"Snow's letting up. It's a beautiful night," she sighed.

"The night, as beautiful as it is, pales in comparison to you."

She smiled again and kissed me. "Thank you. You always say the sweetest things. Maybe that's why I'm so attracted to you."

Holding her close, I took another sip of wine. "It's easy to say them because they're true."

"I love you," she whispered.

"I love you," I whispered back. "More than I can describe."

"I know what you mean. I just feel … happy with you. I didn't think that was going to ever happen again. Not with anyone."

"Sarina," I started then hesitated.

"Yes?"

"I'm happy with you too. And with all I'd been through, I thought that was completely out of reach for me. Then you came along …"

"Here I am," she said after I didn't continue on.

"Here we are."

"Yes, here we are. Is everything alright? You seem like something is bothering you."

"Well, to be honest, I'm afraid," I confessed.

She raised up slightly to see my face. "What are you afraid of?"

"You, sort of."

"Me?" she said in surprise.

"Sort of."

"Why?" she asked.

"I'm afraid I'll lose you. And that's why I have this …"

I started fishing something out of my pocket.

Tears appeared in her eyes when she saw the ring I produced from my pocket. It wasn't large or flashy. It was elegant with clean lines and a single diamond. It was like Sarina herself. Naturally beautiful without a lot of effort.

"Is that what I think it is?" she choked out.

I held the ring in my fingers and hesitated. Now that I was actually doing it, I wondered if I could. Twice before I'd asked women to marry me. Twice before they said yes. And twice before they betrayed me and left me alone. It took all my resolve to trust again.

"Sarina Miller, will you marry me?" I finally managed to say.

Her lip quivered and the tears flowed. "Are you sure about this? I know what you've been through. I know what I've been through. Do you think we can make it work when it never did before for either of us?"

"I am sure. As long as we keep our focus right, God will see us through. But if you're not sure, then don't say yes. I don't know if I can go through all the pain again."

"I love you. I don't want to say no. I don't want to lose you," she stammered.

"Then what do you say?"

"Then I say 'yes'!" she exclaimed and kissed me.

I slipped the ring on her finger and she cried even more. We kissed in spite of her tears of joy. The magic of the night, the magic of the cabin, and the magic of love was going to win this time.

A loud pop from the fire burst the magic and the quilt and the wine were gone. The ring was gone. Sarina was gone. I sat alone on the sofa in a quiet cabin in the mountains miles from anywhere that was somewhere. It was Christmas Eve and I was alone again, just as I'd been the past few years. There was no Sarina, there was no one. I had no one to hold, no one to kiss.

The bright moon shone down on the snow-covered ground and the world outside sparkled. I stared out the window and allowed myself a moment to shed quiet tears. Year after year I came here alone with my Christmas wish. Year after year I remained alone. At least this year it was a beautiful night.

~~~

Did you know I like to write: The Trillborne Wife, Policy, Some Reason, and Fractured Unity.

Time To Clean Those Drives!

Now that my most recent book project is completed and published, it's time to tackle something that's been building up for a while now.

Digital clutter.

I look around in my folders and there are files everywhere. I have bits of this and bits of that, various cover designs at various revision levels, snippets of chapters that were excised for brevity and clarity but worthy of keeping, you name it I have it. It's everywhere and it's a disorganized mess.

Part of this problem occurs because of the way I go about things. I do most of my work online and store everything in the cloud. As a result, my cloud drive is just as disorganized as my local drives. I say local drives because I work from multiple computers, my phone, and my tablet. This is why I do things in the cloud: I can work from anywhere on nearly anything.

So. I'm not complaining about the mess that I made by myself. I'm just pointing out that every so often we all need to do some housekeeping on our computers. It's just my turn.

Since buying bigger hard drives for archiving doesn't really address the problem (I now have two 1 TB drives and one 2 TB drive) but rather moves it around, I have to do the hard thing and look at the files. I'll probably make a grand backup of stuff first, then I'll start culling, both local and cloud.

The most important thing to me to keep are files containing the following:

- photos from my camera/phone
- completed books
- in-process books
- supporting material for books
- source code for software I've written for myself
- music files
- video files
- video project files
- image project files
- legal, tax, and financial files

This is no small task and I'll be taking bites out of this elephant over the Christmas holidays. If I ever post a screaming fit at myself, you know I accidentally deleted something important and it was permanent.

Pray for me :-)

-Kevin

Did you know I like to write: The Trillborne Wife, Policy, Some Reason, and Fractured Unity.

Fractured Unity has now been released!

Deep space is dangerous and humans are fragile beings. Few know this as well as Chief Safety Officer Kenik Duncan. He and a close-knit prospecting crew arrive at Drium, an unexplored world some twenty light years from their home on Unity Station. He has just one job: keep the crew alive. When the unthinkable happens, he finds himself reliving the same crisis that nearly killed him as a younger man. As the reality of isolation gnaws at the crew, Kenik has to make a choice. He can't save them all. But, he can save one ... if he can escape the snare of a fractured unity.

Available now on Kindle and paperback.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078G83F3N

Did you know I like to write: The Trillborne Wife, Policy, Some Reason, and Fractured Unity.

Storm rolling in.

This is the kind of thing I picture in my latest book when I refer to a storm rolling in.

Author Update!

Two days ago, on May 15, 2017, I finished the draft of my latest book. The draft has come in at a little over 135,000 words. Now, I start the editing process. I'm hopeful to pull that number down a little bit and I certainly don't want to make it worse.

Anyway, on Friday, May 19, 2017, I'll be revealing the book title and synopsis on my Facebook author page. At that time, I'll be releasing Chapter 1 beta version on that page so anyone who follows my author page can read it.

I like the path the story took as I developed it. This has been fun.

Did you know I like to write: The Trillborne Wife, Policy, and Some Reason.

An Author's Update

It felt good to get into the "zone" while writing. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to get my butt in gear and do some significant writing on my newest book. I feel pretty good about my results so far. I've drafted 7.5 chapters in the last two weeks for a total of just under 27,000 words.

I don't know how other authors do things, but I really get into the character's emotions. I've been sitting here tonight angry, sad, happy, concerned, afraid, and everything in between.

It may sound like such a chore, but seriously, I love it when I get in the zone like this. It's an awesome feeling when you are creating a story and it actually surprises you the way it evolves in ways you never expected.

I'm following an outline and sticking fairly close to it, but some things sprang onto the page I never imagined. They just happened. That may sound odd if you've never experienced it, but it is awesome.

Sometimes, it's frustrating. I knew how I wanted the relationship between two characters to be, but the story wrote a different relationship. I fought with the story a few days, but the story won. What I originally wanted was just... bad. Just incredibly bad. What it became was good. Or at least potentially good.

I hope to write an update at least once a week. That should hold me accountable in keeping up the writing schedule so I can finish this book for self-publication in June or July.

Note: editing can take a really long time.

The Nearly Lost Art of Assembly Language

Looking around at all the modern programming languages and methods, one would think we know more about writing good code now than ever before. One would think that we have risen to the point of writing code in ways that preclude the necessity of even understanding how the CPU operates and the operating system functions.

Sadly, we are at that point to a large extent. Ask new grad programmers - I dare not list the degrees specifically given the plethora of degrees that generate programmers - how their lines of code actually work under the covers and you will get stammers or blank stares. Ask them how function calls - and even if you are an object-oriented enthusiast methods are still functions - are handled in context switches. You may get an explanation shows a rudimentary explanation, but ask them for specific CPU register names and you've exceeded their wealth of knowledge.

Once upon a time, universities taught programmers how to write assembly language code. That is no longer the case. You will find it in masters programs as electives, maybe even a short segment of a required class, but you don't find undergrads being taught assembly language code.

In the past, the argument could be made that was because there were far too many processor architectures that had vastly different instruction sets. That meant there was no predominant assembly language with the exception of IBM mainframe assembly language courtesy of the System 370 which a lot of guys my age had to learn.

Some of us also picked up VAX assembly language and maybe even Sparc. Some of us were fortunate enough to have learned assembly language programming for the x86 architecture back in the day.

But the diversity excuse for not teaching assembly language doesn't float anymore. And in for all practical and commercial concerns, there are two assembly languages that could dominate for the role: x86 and ARM.

One could add Arduino to that list now as it's popularity among hobbyists is huge.

With the small device world embracing ARM, its assembly language would be a strong contender. With the thriving popularity of Arduino, that is also a strong contender.

However, the reality is every programmer out there has access to some kind of x86 based PC or laptop. They also have a number of excellent hypervisors that can provide x86 virtual machines to safely hammer away in assembly language in kernel space without the worry of damaging their actual machine.

So that begs the question. With the ubiquitous availability of computers and the gcc suite which compiles x86 assembly language, there really is no barrier to learning assembly language or teaching it in colleges and universities.

There is something satisfying, even elegant, in writing assembly language code. Seeing the machine code representation output from the assembler is like seeing the actual Rosetta Stone (not the software, the actual artifact). You see this indecipherable sequence of numbers (in hex) and its simplest explanation in a readable format.

I like that.

So the next time you are crafting your amazing class structure or using some new programming pattern for handling linked lists or some new multi-way linked trees, take a moment to pause and remember there is machine code under it. And think about that machine code as if it were on a Rosetta Stone that you can read.

Also rememver that every line of high-level code, from the "p = p->next" to the "object.next" iterator, can all be written in assembly language. Yes, it would take longer. And it not only can be done, it has been done.