The Blog of Days

The question I get most often when people hear that I have a novel coming out is "What's it about?" The second most-asked question is "What made you write about that?" or "How did you come up with that story?" People are interested in back stories. So, here is the bac...

In 1972, a security guard walking a routine beat at the Watergate hotel in Washington D.C., noticed that a door had been rudely jimmied, and tape had been applied to the door jamb in an amateurish fashion. The guard called it in, and police began a search of the office...

A new college semester is about to get underway, and in addition to the usual composition courses on my slate, I’ll be teaching an Intro to Literature class. Many of you, my friends, both write and teach, and being able to make a life founded on the magic of language...

While broadening this blog beyond the topic of writing, I don’t want to get into politics. I’m of the opinion that there is too much bloviating on that topic and it doesn’t need whatever hot air I could add to it. However, the President’s recent speech on his plan to...

Time is a fascinating measurement. Leaving aside the physics/metaphysics argument of whether or not time actually exists, the time of day or year governs how we relate to the world. I’m not talking about the regulation of our days – time to rise, get to work, take a b...

Although I was too young to experience the Sixties, I grew up listening to “Classic Rock.” While my best friend became a walking compendium of knowledge about nearly every group of that era, I became entranced by the lyrics of those songs, despite the fact that I wa...

 I’m a very slow writer. A single short story can take up to six months for me to get to a point where I feel it’s finally right. A poem can take almost as long. Many of the writers I know complete whole drafts before going back to revise, and I admire that method. I...

Today, in the U.S., it’s Labor Day. Over the course of my lifetime, I have seen this holiday change from nod to the contribution of workers in society to a day when we realize that summer vacations are coming to an end. So in this post, I would like to return the spir...

Writers are, or should be, eminently curious, even when it gets us into trouble. The reason is that this curiosity leads us to discover things that may be more interesting than what we were looking for in the first place.

I’m currently reworking a novel, so I decided t...

So, we begin with what I’m hoping will be an occasionally-recurring theme in this blog: Unsung Reads or Writers. These are books or their writers who have little or no name recognition among today’s reading public for any of several reasons: They got lost in the shuffl...