Man, being an optimist during a pandemic is NOT easy! Every person who works in a grocery store, gas station or convenience store that I've talked to has told me stories about how horrible people have been lately. Rude. Selfish. Impatient. But then, on the other hand, there's that picture of all those rich people spelling out WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER with their yachts. Seriously though, these are stressful times. People are worried. Worried about their jobs, their kids and pare

So, I've been trying to find the right words to express myself lately. You'd think, with all the extra time on my hands, that I'd be writing up a storm. That my keyboard would be summoning wizards and dinosaurs and scary little girls who come out of bath tubs. After all, every author says "If I only had more time." Hell, I've said that plenty over the years. If I only had more time, I'd write the next Great American Novel. If only I had more time, I'd write a best-seller and

My toothpaste has water in it This may seem like a strange statement to you. It’s not like it’s something you hear every day. But you need to understand this is the truth. For some reason, my toothpaste has water in it. So much that whenever I squeeze the tube, little bubbles pop out as the toothpaste splurms onto my toothbrush. It’s disconcerting. Toothpaste should not splurm. It should splat properly. But somehow, water got into the tube and now I have splurmy paste every t

Authors like to play around with time. Time travel. Past lives. Future dreams. Even a fairly straightforward narrative still massages time. Time jumps. Flashbacks. Co-current events. I think that most of us have an uneasy relationship with time. On the one hand, it seems easy. Tick tock. tick tock. The clock never stops. We know the sun comes up, moves across the sky and sinks in the west. Day becomes night becomes day. Spring leads into summer and so on. And yet...AND YET it

So I'm not really the type that leaves notes to myself. At least not at home. At work I have all sorts of notes but that's only because I am responsible for keeping track of a zillion details. And my writing, of course. Lots of random notes there. In journals and notebooks and sticky notes on the desk. But that's only because I have different plot points and characters to keep tabs on. Ok, ok. Fine, I write notes. But, I don't really write notes for everyday stuff. No "don't

I consider myself a somewhat creative individual. I mean, yes, I write stories and create new worlds. But that's a lot easier than most people realize. We all do it. We all have those fever dreams that shake us out of our routines and make us question everything we think we know. We all have started telling a story to friends only to get distracted by some oddball tangent and suddenly realize we have no idea what we were talking about in the first place because we're now in a

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here." ---Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland When I decided to start the Story King Chronicles, I had no idea where it would end up, but I knew where it would begin. With madness. The first chapter of Jom is titled 'The Bedlam War' and is a p

I start walking. At first, the sky is clear. Deep blue with a bright yellow eye in the center. But then clouds sneak in when I’m not looking and the rain begins. It’s not cold rain. Nor is it warm. Nor wet, for that matter. It’s just tiny droplets of reality falling on me from somewhere else. Or maybe not falling. Maybe they are moving sideways and I’m the one that’s falling. It feels like that, doesn’t it, as each foot falls to the cement? We are continuously falling. A squi