Tara Maya's Tales

Bad guys can make a story great. Evil people make terrible neighbors but riveting characters. Do stories need evil characters? After the "Joker" shooting at the movie theater in Aurora, I wondered if in writing about evil people, we risk glorifying evil, and encouraging rather than discouraging horrible acts. I know some writers don't see themselves as having any moral obligation in their writing, but I see writing fiction as a profoundly moral act. Imagination and spirituality are linked at the hip; you cannot imagine something without engaging both your empathy and your ethics. How we imagine the world impacts how we live in the world. But this does mean we should only write about good people, who always do the right thing and have happy endings? No fricken' way. Because that has nothing whatsoever to do with our struggle as human beings to be ethical or empathetic. We struggle all the time to be better people in a world filled with truly horrid people -- li...

I'm an introvert. It's not easy for me to open up to people, but this doesn't mean I don't care about others. There have been times when strangers thought I was "cold" or uninterested in them just because I was too shy to socialize. I'm ashamed to say, there have been friends who thought that too. I admit, I live in imagined worlds far, far from the physical locale of my body, and not everyone understands that. But I don't want to be so preoccupied my with my own worlds that I ignore the people I care about. When I was in school, I found it easy to maintain friendships, because I was forced to be with friends. Now, however, it's all too easy to drift apart. I have friends on the internet, but even then, it's easy to let those relationships be no deeper than a Facebook post or a 140 Twitter characters. So recently, I've made a private pledge to keep in closer contact with friends and people I care about. Here are the five things I...

Just a little sketch I did on Photoshop.

This century started out poorly, let's be honest. Barely a year in, and what have you got, but morons flying planes into buildings, war, more war and economic depression. It seems like at home and abroad there are fanatics trying to drag us back into the dark ages. Hello, was this what the Twenty-First Century was supposed to be like? Heck, no. Here, however, is something that finally makes me feel like I'm living in the Twenty-First Century I was promised-- 3D printers for your home ! How awesome is that? Only $1300. We had to get the plumbing fixed in our home (which was built in the dark ages), so sadly this is not something we can afford. But some rich yuppies somewhere will buy it, and help bring the price down for the rest of us. (See? There is a good use for the idle rich!) In a few years, I hope, this tech will be better and cheaper and I will buy one. You may be thinking, "Why do I need a 3D printer in my home?" This is the beginning of having...