July 2023 | A.S. Akkalon - Fantasy Author

A nerd’s guide to choosing a forever coffee shop

Each week my colleagues and I go for coffee. The decision of which café to visit is momentous and is made only every five years. Here’s how.

I work with nerds. That’s not an insult–I’m a nerd myself. Once a week my nerd friends and I go out to a coffee shop, where we talk about work problems, nerdy stuff, or why everyone must see the Barbie movie right now.

Deciding which coffee shop to visit each time would be time-consuming and might result in a pitched battle in the office, so we go to the same coffee shop every week.

Not just any coffee shop, but the best coffee shop.

How do we know it’s the best?

How not to bake healthy bread with a breadmaker

Breadmakers are wonderful, and if you can follow a few simple instructions you can easily use them to bake healthy bread. Sadly, I can’t.

At some point when early woman got home from chasing a wildebeest across the Serengeti and still had to knead her bread dough, she stopped and thought, gee there are a lot of steps to making bread. It would be much easier if I had a machine to do all this for me.

Thus was the breadmaker created.*

* It’s possible this isn’t precisely what happened. Not likely, but possible.

I have such a breadmaker, a gift from a relative whose faith in my ability to make bread without a breadmaker is… fairly accurate.

Unfortunately, it turned out my ability to make bread with a breadmaker is not much better.

Is it unoriginal to write about dragons?

Sometimes I worry it’s unoriginal to write about dragons, then I realise that’s a ridiculous concern. Here’s why.

From time to time I have the uneasy feeling that when I write about dragons I’m being unoriginal.

Fantasy books can contain any fantastical creatures I can create, so why stick to this familiar beast? Am I taking the imagination out of a genre that lives based on its imagination?

After deep contemplation, I decided no.

Here’s why.

The night the monster wasn’t under the bed

The spooky and almost entirely true story about the night my cats didn’t find a monster under my bed

A scratching noise woke me at 2am.

I stared at the paler patch of ceiling over the curtains and thought of the drawers under my bed, which slid in and out too easily and were deep enough to hide a man-eating monster.

The scratching came again. It was definitely under my bed.