Cat Pollock Writes

Hello, and welcome to another Tuesday Blog.   What does that make, two this month? Wow. Cool. I feel a little more on top of things right now.  Anyway - I was going through my drafts folder yesterday, and found an old post I wrote a couple of years ago that (minus editing) was ready to go up at any time. I refrained back then because I was a mess and some of the things that I talk about in this post were fresh wounds at the time. I wanted to give myself some space to heal and see how I felt about this post once I was further along in the process.  Funny how it took so long, eh?  Hope you enjoy this little glimpse into the mind of Cat in 2017. If matters of faith aren't your thing, no worries. Thursday's post is all about science fiction. :-) --------------------- Inspirational quotes and sayings. Mantras. Manifestos. I think almost every single person on the planet with a social media account is guilty of passing on the ones that resonate with u...

Happy Thursday! Time travel, aliens, and alternate histories. We're hitting all this and more in this's months review, so stick around if any of these science fiction sub-genres tickle your fancy. Disclaimer Tag/Spoiler Warning: The book for this month's review was provided to me for free by the author in exchange for a fair and honest review of their work. Machine Sense Dominic Schunker, 2019, Offworld Publishing Summary: The timeline is changing, and Zak seems to be the only person who can see it. Overnight, his best friend becomes a stranger. One president becomes another. TV shows disappear off the schedule and environmental disasters that had been successfully averts occur without warning. He's gotten used to holding his tongue, filing the changes away and adjusting to them... until his teenage daughter starts seeing the same things. In order to keep Izzi alive, Zak has to figure out who is trying is manipulate the timeline, why they're...

Happy Thursday! As you can see, I've decided that the only way is through and to continue with the Science Fiction Through the Centuries series.  I apologize in advance for the shortness of the list this time around. There were more books on this list at the end of last month, but in my attempt to be more thorough I realized some needed to be knocked off. Hopefully the inclusion of one of the first space stories to be written by a woman will earn me some forgiveness. Marie de Roumier-Robert - Voyage de Milord Céton dans les Sept Planètes (Lord Seton's Voyage Among the Seven Planets) - 1765 This may not be the first work included in this blog series to have been written by a woman, but it is the first written by a woman that might qualify as space opera. In this outer space adventure, Lord Céton and his sister Monime travel to the seven known planets in our solar system on the wings of a genie. In their travels, they find that the inhabitants of each plan...

Hello, and welcome to another Tuesday blog. So, at the end of last week, I had what I thought was this brilliant idea for an extra blog post this month (since I do have posts scheduled for every Thursday in April). Inspirational/motivational quotes are always crowd-pleasers, right? That's what my Instagram stats say every time I post them. I always get a good response. Slapping quotes into a post with - perhaps - a comment or two seemed like the way to go. Perhaps you'll understand the irony of my situation at this moment. I'm finding plenty of motivation to type out a long-winded explanation of what is going on. I'm struggling to motivate myself to do what I had planned with this post. If you don't feel motivated to do what you originally planned, then come up with another plan. Yeah, I could hear that sentiment coming from the chair my rear end is currently planted in - which may be a few feet or a few thousand miles away. There's a reason why I ...

Happy Thursday! When I started writing the first post in this series about tools I use as a writer, I figured it would be a one-off post that garnered little attention. I had a vague idea for a series like this, but the post was filler content while I figured out where I was going with the blog. I had no idea that a post about the thesauruses I use would become the most popular post on my blog to-date. I didn't know it would spin off into this series. I could never have guessed that there would a post early in the series about plagiarism checkers. Then again, I had no way of knowing that a piece of my own content writing would be plagiarized, or that a massive case of plagiarism like #copypastecris would be exposed. Maybe I'll be able to talk about what happened to me someday, but we're not there yet. In the meantime, I decided to channel my anger and frustration about what happened into something productive - for myself and the writing community at large. ...