Author Shows You How Easy It Is For Him For anyone following the word-count on Shopkeep to the left on the home page, note that in the brief month of February, not yet complete, the count has tripled. That’s 20k scattered words now grown to 60k. In three weeks.
Same Black Line Drawn on Local Author Drawn on You Remember the 90s? Skateboarding home from school, getting stoned and making it with your girlfriend to the latest Pavement CD, then playing SimCity until dinnertime? Well, I don’t, but I did do my version of that in the early 80s. It’s the rock music of […]
Last month the local community said goodbye to a figure of renown, Col. Jack Van Loan, USAF (ret.), a true friend to our neighborhood, and to me personally. He will be missed. Here is a brief essay about our relationship. When I first met the man I would come to think of as The Colonel, […]
Here’s an essay I wrote following the death of my mom back in 2015. I sent it around to a couple of competitions, but it didn’t seem to tickle any fancies. During the summer of my mother’s fatal cancer ordeal, on the sixth of August—Hiroshima Day, a hell-on-earth milestone after which all of human history […]
Dear Allyson: It’s that grim anniversary again. I was up before the dawn today thinking of you, and of how there are no more dawns and dusks where you are, which is not with us here on the blue rock.
Clay B and me, front of board, mics well hidden, we made a fine, fine tape. Not my best writing, this haiku, but I composed it while grieving over the news that my old friend Clay had passed away, and under personal circumstances of a sudden and tragic nature. Maybe I wanted to cheer myself […]
Now that I’m into the revision phase of my work on DIXIANA, and a light revision phase at that, I thought I’d once again promote the availability of my editorial service, which is explained below. By this point in my life I’ve enjoyed quite the varied writing career, with much accumulated knowledge and professional experience to share, including […]
The Grateful Dead’s Spring Tour 1993 proved to be a time of renewal—the previous December, Jerry Garcia had returned from a canceled fall tour and a(nother) health crisis looking spry, trim (by his standards) and energetic. A happy time to be a Deadhead! March winds were gonna blow all our troubles away. On the 22nd anniversary of […]
Yes, We Have No Nirvanas I grew up wanting to be a writer. An only child who spent lonely afternoons and summers at the home of grandparents who lived in a neighborhood without kids, books and reading were (insert drumroll) my constant companions. Yawn. How many times have we heard those very words out of […]
(Originally published in Free Times, Columbia, SC, January 2011) The swinging, heady San Francisco scene of the 1960s remains a long, strange distance from the bucolic conservatism of a place like South Carolina, but in a weird brand of cosmic irony, Columbia now has an important, tangible link to those flower-child days of yore: Former […]
