The Green Acres Effect

After much delay at the hands of family matters, I’m back on the case of finishing The Amazing Secret of the Castle Omi La for this year’s VBS. A little bit of history here. The first VBS play I did was The Terrible Misfortune. It was a pirate-themed show. It was influenced by every cliche [...]

Michael Crichton, 1942 – 2008

In 1969, this kid who wanted to be a writer walked into his local library and was browsing in the adult section when he happened upon a book on the New shelf. The cover intrigued him. He picked it up, read the inside flap, read the opening sentence – and was hooked. He checked the [...]

Scary Monsters

More fodder from my friend Scoob, spinning off of an e-mail discussion we were having about comic books part of which was referenced here. Only this part of the conversation has to do with fear. Namely, things that scared me as a child. Growing up in the 1960′s was a fairly idyllic time, at least [...]

15 Things About Writing and Me

Continuing the memage, the writing variation of the book meme, which mutated here. Looking at the others who have done this, I see that for once I am rather short-winded. I think this is because this entire blog is about writing, and more than enough to make up for my terseness here. At one time, [...]

15 Things About Books and Me

There’s a meme going around (started here) wherein readers list 15 (or more) things about the relationship they have with books. The numbers of people who have already done this are huge, and I suspect that I’m the last person in the blogging galaxy to be doing this. But here are some anyway. According to [...]

All I Have To Do is Dream

How many of you creatives out there find inspiration in, or get your ideas from dreams? Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after a disturbing dream (and the first draft was so disturbing that his wife made him destroy it); ditto Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Ditto again [...]

The Man in Black is Gone

“Ah fell in to a burnin’ ring of far –Ah went down down down and the flames went har…” This is how we used to make fun of Johnny Cash when I was a snot-nosed junior-high kid. It was how most people we knew made fun of Johnny Cash. But it should also be noted [...]

Another Toothbrush Postmortem

This morning I had to run down to the iBook before leaving for work to type in an addition to something I wrote last night. Just a little something to make it better. While scraping the molars it also occurred to me that, while I referred to And/News as screwball noir, I’m not sure if [...]

The Bee

Today I had occasion to go to one of the most thrilling and suspenseful events I have ever seen. Sporting events never did much for me, and they certainly couldn’t hold a candle to the excitement of what I saw today. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time… a real white-knuckler. [...]

What Makes Something Funny? (Part 1)

What makes something funny? Why do we find certain things funny and other not? Here I am, working on my dozenth novel, which uses humor throughout to temper the deadly chase the protagonists are in. All of my other novels had humor in them to one degree or another. I’ve written a darkly comic play. [...]

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