As promised, here’s the second installment of the short story. Reconciliation: Part 2 II For a while, he was content with those feelings but soon the urge to get up and go began to burn fiercely in his heart. Theodore had never previously felt the need to go anywhere but the world he encountered in…

It’s been a while since my last post and a lot has happened in the interval. I spent some time reviewing what I’ve learned about writing since I started this blog, looking at what I’ve done, reading about writing, even taking an online course on Creative Writing. I ended up feeling good about what I’ve…

Every schoolboy knows that good writers seldom use clichés. The word is commonly defined as ‘a word or phrase that is overused, unoriginal or boring’ but it’s important to recognize that, while most writers try their best to be original, fresh and entertaining, if you’re writing to advance a particular idea, or a point of…

William Safire was a conservative speechwriter who served both Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon; it was Safire who coined the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism‘ phrase that worked so well for Agnew. For many years, Safire wrote a column titled On Language* for the The New York Times and it was always entertaining and informative, on language at least.…

Our President proudly commands the biggest, workingest nuclear button in the world. Perhaps. I know that he’s a fella that has a little difficulty with complex ideas. It’s okay to call a country a shithole because it’s economically poor and to pretend that you never  intended to demean the people who name it as their…

When I first decided to write and publish fiction, I thought that I’d spend some time writing poetry. The idea was that writing poetry would be good practice for producing concise and powerful prose. I’ve since stopped writing poetry, though I still indulge the habit from time to time, in trying my hand at songwriting.…

And depending on how you look at it, mine is amazing or awful. In a recent post here I shared that I had decided that my next book was going to be an elephant story, provisionally titled Magua the Elephant. Since I knew very little about elephants I embarked on my usual round of research on the…

“Empirical research shows that no domestic arrangement, not even one in which the mother works full time and the father is unemployed, results in child-care parity between heterosexual spouses. The story we tell ourselves, the one about great leaps toward the achievement of gender equality between parents, is a glass-half-full kind of interpretation. But the reality is…