That’s my new phrase—“blog-gone”—for the infliction of unintended blog posting absence. It’s certainly not caused by a lack of discipline, as I shall describe below, but rather, perhaps in my case, due to a fear that what one has to say just may not be all that...

I bought tickets last summer as soon as I read the announcement of The Who’s scheduled “Quadrophenia” tour. MSG—Madison Square Garden—“The World’s Greatest Arena,” December 5, 2012…Last Night! I’d seen The Who three times previously, the last being in 1975, ugh—37...

Perhaps it is the grinding uncertainty of an election year (all too often causing partisan anxiety akin to a constant bloodletting), which spawns a slew of post-apocalyptic literature. Now, I haven’t studied the publishing patterns of prior election cycles—and...

Sometimes, our choice of reading (or listening) material forces us down roads of memory that we never intended. Such was the case for me recently, and, like so many choices of a writer, this path resulted from rejection. Before the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference...

At AWP this year, the social media panel suggested that being consistent timing of one’s blog posts was critical. Hence, my multi-week blog post hiatus. Did I simply have nothing to say? Of course not. Were all the recent movies not worthy of comment? Nonsense. (The...

I cannot deny that I’m a fan of television. It’s partly generational: anyone born in the fifties, with access to even a tiny black & white set, grew up battling for every opportunity to turn loose our minds on the images poured forth in often gentle waves from...

“I never got this far in my dreams.”  Bubba Watson, 2012 Master’s Golf Champion I’m not sure if writers are allowed to admit they play golf, but I do; and so did John Updike (where, other than an also-shared aquiline protrusion, our similarities cease), and P.D....

The most common advice in the book…so to speak. Every writer’s workshop or craft book offers the same maxim, and yet how often have you written a sentence, paragraph, or page, and been certain of your masterful avoidance of exposition, only to find on re-reading—or...

The number is 52. Now you couldn’t be faulted for thinking the number equated to weeks in a year, but that’s not its significance here. Its calculation required a careful count, which started with the small shelves on either side of files behind my desk, 16 found...

Perhaps the most popular current category (save for vampires and zombies—which must fade soon…right?) in the publishing world, memoirs are an odd sort. There is no shortage of well-written, heartrending chronicles of horrible and tortured pasts where the writer...