In a blog about romance writing, The Healthy Writer Blog, an exercise for writers involved coming up with the names of your ten favorite movies. Many doubted they could name ten, although naming ten books would have been easy. Of course I was tempted to try to name ten myself,…
A while back a friend of mine complained that s/he had been de-Friended by someone on Facebook, and didn’t know why. Facebook, like many Internet sites, provides a method by which you can e-mail a private message to someone, even if you are not officially Friends. There is also the…
Remember my post awhile back about how I would never be seen in that purple blouse because someone enormous on The Biggest Loser wore the same blouse? Well. On the Clean House episode, “Exposing the Truth,” the lady of the house who has over-bought toys and under-disciplined her children until…
“The beauty of a writer vs. an artist is that a writer tends to get better over time. More experiences and living equal more grist for the mill.” [Oh, dear. I no longer know who I am quoting. Sorry. If you are living, please identify yourself.] One of the issues…
As I was walking the High Line in New York this week—not because it’s terribly fashionable right now, but because I am a fan of old railroads and especially of gardens—my girlfriend was eager to find a good place on that elevated park path from which we could view a…
A couple of boys I knew, one in high school, and one in college, always seemed to be big shots in the making. They were destined for the stars. They talked about making a splash as adults, and they acted as if they would be major successes. In high school,…
“…despite having gone back to college numerous times to update my skills…. I think I’ve finally given up on that, considering how little it gained me in the long term.” That snippet is from my previous post. I know my college professor friends think I’m an idiot to believe that…
From time to time I read rants by Gen Xers (the generation born between 1965 and 1982) about how Baby Boomers have stolen all the good jobs and there is no upward mobility because we are hogging everything. How we are completely self-absorbed, selfish, and fatuous. We’re whiners, too. I…
Four months ago, when I thought winter couldn’t get any worse (boy, was I wrong), and there was snow all over the ground (but not the four feet of it that came later), I started writing a novel. Out of sheer boredom and frustration. I haven’t looked at it since,…
Recently, I completed a lengthy e-mail interview with Bryan Stroud for his The Silver Lantern site, which is dedicated to superhero comic books of the Silver Age, the 1960s. Bryan has posted interviews with a lot of people I know from the comic book biz, so I am happy to…
