A towheaded little kid came over to me in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. “You have an iPad!” he said, peering down at the screen. “Do you have any games?” “Just Scrabble,” I said. “You should have more games,” he said. “I could find one for you. Us kids know all about technology.” […]
Sometimes I feel unlucky. Then something happens to remind me of the good fortune in my life In the early ’70’s, I attended Knox College, where I earned a B.A. degree with Honors in creative writing. Back then, Knox had one of the few undergraduate creative writing programs in the country. Now you can thumb […]
I’ve been asked to take part in a project called The Knox Writers’ House. At this point I don’t know much about the project, only that it’s associated with my alma mater, Knox College, and that I’ll be interviewed then recorded as I read two selections – something I wrote and something by a writer who inspired me. Choosing […]
If you hang around Amazon’s Kindle store, you probably know that many customers are pissed about the higher prices of Kindle books. They grouse endlessly in various community forums and spit invective at Amazon, at publishers, even at writers. Now their protests have found another outlet. Furious that the Kindle edition of Michael Connelly’s latest thriller […]
Exam week looms. I have more than sixty research essays to read and mark. They must be finished in time to return at final exams. Grading research essays requires additional work because I require photocopies or printouts of written sources, and I check to make sure students are citing correctly. The workload is daunting enough that […]
This week I decided to fill in one of the millions of gaps in my education by reading a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for Remains of the Day, the one about the butler, but Never Let Me Go is about clones. Surely, I thought, a novel about clones had […]
If you’ve been here before, you probably notice that the site looks different. I’ve moved from Quick BlogCast to my hosting domain and rebuilt Ancient Children using WordPress. In many ways Quick Blogcast is easier to use, but it allows fewer design options than WordPress, and I’ve received a few complaints that the site wouldn’t display properly on […]
Lately I’ve been sorting through piles of snapshots inherited from my grandmother. On the back of each one she diligently noted the date and who was in the shot. I’m grateful to her for that. Sometimes I can’t recognize faces from long ago.The purpose of my project is to find photos of Steve, scan them, and […]
I used to have a recurring dream about Soldier Summit, the dying town high in the mountains of Utah where my parents began their marriage and my brother and I first lived. Though it has been years, my memory of the dream remains vivid. I am hiking along a road with snowbanks on both sides and […]
In my heart I keep hoping each new piece of technology will be the spark that sets my writing on fire. I wasn’t always this way. Once I detested the term “word processing,” which seemed to imply that the act of writing was like pulverizing fruit in a blender. My techno-lust began the day Joe […]
I was halfway through the latest revision of Chasing the Light when I realized it needed a prologue. In a novel the prologue usually presents an event that belongs to the story but outside the plot – something happening beforehand or afterward or elsewhere that influences or explains the main action. I wanted the prologue […]
In a post a couple of weeks ago, All Characters Must Die , I wondered why readers care so fiercely about fictional characters. I figured the key was identification and empathy. Readers find enough of themselves in the characters to climb inside their fictional skin and experience the story. But understanding isn’t enough. As a […]
