Twelve years ago, on Sept 11, my coworker at Barry School was murdered along with most of her family, including her five-year-old son. The ...

I'd love to say I didn't blog for two weeks because I was on vacation (especially this time of year, when the anxious, shopping hord...

Several years ago my day job was actually a night job, working as a sweeper at a grade school. It wasn’t a bad job for a writer, because I ...

Ernie and I went hiking up the Heiroglyphic Trail in the Superstitions yesterday (there are actually petroglyphs at the end of the trail)....

When you’ve hiked in a place several times, and you love that place, and maybe even have made up your own names for features you always see ...

I’ve been gardening in Phoenix for about 10 years now, and I’ve learned that if I want the seeds I sow to sprout, I have to use the blitz ap...

I don’t believe in the End of the World. Call it Ragnarok, The Apocalypse, Armageddon, The Rapture, 2012, whatever. It’s not going to happ...

Recently I’ve been kvetching a lot about the book biz, specifically about working for one of the big brick & mortar chains. And I’ve ha...

Previously I blogged about ideas, specifically where writers get them. I mentioned that writers don’t have a problem thinking up stories, we...

There are many perfectly innocent questions that readers ask writers, but the one that’s most likely to make some writers go ballistic is Wh...

When you’re under 20, you think you’d rather commit suicide than get old, partly because you can’t imagine how you’re going to cope with loo...

Ernie had his own take on the Utah road trip I wrote about in the previous blog entry. He saw things from an artist’s point of view. This po...

You don’t need to read Jack Kerouac to know that road trips can change your life. In August 2008, a road trip changed mine. But here’s the ...