Novelist Herman Wouk — age 96! — has a new novel coming out in the fall.  And it's not the least bit posthumous. In the picture in The Washington Post, he looks like a fully operational 78.  His new book, The Lawgiver, is  a story of characters who are making a movie about Moses.  It is totally au courant: […] Read More

I haven't had a Coke since mid-morning yesterday — and I poured the last two-thirds of that one out in the bathroom sink. Nor have I had a tall 20 ounces of McDonald's sweet tea. Or settled down with a half-gallon of frozen yogurt.  Having a little change of diet here, dropping some of my […] Read More

Tonight I came home tired and sleepy, with work that still needed to be done.  Didn't even have the energy it takes to enjoyably procrastinate.  No weeding, reading, or frittering.  Then I remembered a tidbit of wisdom I'd been saving to post here: about a strategy for shaking an undesirable mood by behaving in opposition to the […] Read More

Please help me choose.  My novel Revelation, which came out in hardback in 1988, is re-emerging in a few weeks in digital form. Which of these would you use?  A, B, or C.  The Revelation cover needs to give a very slight hint that something unsettling and off-kilter goes on in the story.  Troubled minister, stirred-up […] Read More

My wrestle last week with my bit of obsessive compulsive disorder (see previous post) came to a happy ending.  I got a new prescription.  It's working great and I feel wonderful. Also, I started planting big shrubs to screen out the forest devastation I was upset about.  (Again, the previous post will allow this to […] Read More

A friend suggested I might hold off on blogging today.  And she has a point.  What one says online tends to be permanent and I can already imagine writing an apology tomorrow for whatever I say today. But I regularly claim here to write about coping with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it seems like dodging the subject and potential usefulness to […] Read More

I'm on the verge of getting my first novel Revelation (Simon & Schuster, 1988) out in digital form.  And I've been having second thoughts about which set of paragraphs should open the story: the one that I first turned in to my editor, or the material that I added which served as the opening of […] Read More

 [youtube rPbo3TA8ogc] [youtube /rPbo3TA8ogc] Last night was the second time that a Duke basketball team reminded me to never give up a millisecond before the buzzer. I'm not even a huge sports fan — hadn't watched a basketball game all season.  But last night the legendary rivalry broke out once again: Duke vs. Carolina.  And […] Read More

The bottom line:  I boldly stayed on the green ("Easier") ski run and enjoyed a day of skiing without having to be rescued even once. The backstory:  last week I mentioned here that I would be going skiing again for a day for the first time in more than 15 years.  My career as a […] Read More

On an impulse this week, I sent out an email to about a dozen or so friends whom I thought might have sufficiently flexible schedules and adventurous spirits, asking them to go skiing with me Monday afternoon.  The trip from here to Beech Mountain:  an early morning four hour drive, then four hours or so […] Read More