A Lost Dream

Dreams are often filled with garbled messages and strange people—do they really mean anything? In all likelihood, yes. The problem is, dreams tend to dissolve on contact with the waking world, like cotton candy in your mouth, and the harder we try to remember them, the faster they disappear. In literature and movies, dreams are […]

Friday Frenzy: The NaNos

Oh, what a fool am I. So, I committed to two NaNos this week. NaNoWriMo, of course, that you know about. But when Peggy Eddleman started talking up NaNoReviMo, I thought, why not? Why not? indeed. Parallel Lives was just about ready to go. And it’s about time, too. I’ve been writing that sucker since […]

NaNo Yes, or NaNo No?

NaNo YES! I must be nuts. Appropriate, since I just finished reading Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (I’m just loving my daughter’s AP English class reading list). I heartily recommend that book, by the way. But, yes, I’m in. I actually sketched out a short list of characters and the barest bones […]

What if…?

Here’s a bad old joke I remember: A man walks up to a woman in a bar. He introduces himself and asks, “If I paid you a million dollars, would you go to bed with me?”The woman considers the question, and then says, “Yes.”The man then asks, “Well, if I paid you five dollars, would […]

Casting Call!

Yesterday, the white stuff fell for the first time this year, amassing a whopping less than half an inch. My wife is grumbling. I point out that last year, the school had to burn a snow day before the month of October was out, so we’re ahead so far (technically, we’re even with last year, […]

Monday Musings

In case you’re not already aware of it (and aren’t a reader of blogs belonging to Carrie Butler, Lisa Regan, or Melodie Wright, this week they are running …. and I jumped in with an entry (Fool! What have you done?). However, I’m not ready to run mine today, so it will have to wait, […]

Back on the Platform Again

A few years back, I had the following conversation with a friend of mine, who was considering selling his house in order to get a larger one for his expanding family. Him: “They’re [real estate agents] telling me my house is worth $400,000. You’ve been in my house, Jeffo. You know it’s not worth $400,000!”Me: […]

I Don’t Like Mondays

(Actually, I really don’t have anything against Mondays) When I was in my teens, radio wasn’t quite like it is today, where everything feels so compartmentalized and genreficied (I think I just made that up). Sure, you had stations that were rock, and stations that were country, and stations that were dance and new wave, […]

A Note of Explanation…

…for why this is what it is. I admit it, I am a fan of so-called ‘Seat of the Pants’ writing, or, as it’s frequently-called on Absolute Write: Pantsing. I hate that phrase, not because it isn’t accurate (it is), but because of the way the word looks and sounds. Pantsing. Pantser. It looks ugly […]

The Platform Thing

About a week ago, Nancy Thompson wrote on her blog about…well, blogging, and how tiring it had become. She started her blog because she’d read that it was important for writers to ‘establish a platform’, and blogging was a means of doing that. But the blog thing is wearing her down, and Nancy finds herself […]