Hello! Whoa, that last blog post was heavy. Yes, 2023 was rougher than we expected, our legs cut from under us, you know how it goes, medical surprises and other emergencies. But the storm passed and things are better now. Golden sunshine and gentle breezes abound. I thought I’d give a quick writerly update and ..read more

So it’s been a while. A few things have happened here in the Tavormina household. Some personal crises have resolved well thank God; others have gone the other way. You know how it is. You’ve had your own life over the past year, with highs and lows and things you wish had never crossed your ..read more

If you’ve ever taken a crack at storytelling, you know a story can be told by a narrator, by a character, or by several characters. It can be told in first-person narration, or second person, or third. I went downstairs, where my brother was waiting. He never trusted me to take care of these things ..read more

There’s a trail behind our house called the Hidden Pond trail. You reach it by first going downhill, past a creek that only runs in the winter and otherwise lays white and parched as a bone. At the bridge over that creek, a dusty footpath heads off to the right. It goes up, into dry ..read more

Something that’s really exploded over the past twenty years is the number of exoplanets—planets outside our solar system orbiting distant stars and pulsars. Unlike discoveries of new comets and asteroids, which sometimes happen through ‘citizen science,’ exoplanets are discovered by astronomers dedicated to the task. In the 1970s, such planets were thought likely to exist ..read more

2020 stretched on forever. 2020 felt like three, four, five years—of waiting. A planet full of people waiting, and all of us focused on one thing: coronavirus. In early spring, the pandemic was declared, and we tried to figure out what that meant to us personally. We acclimated, and adapted, and communicated, and researched, and ..read more

The other day I wondered if I might lengthen a few of my existing short stories. These were originally written as character sketches, brief prequels to the world I had created for my novels. Two of those short tales are posted under my fiction tab. But if those stories could be longer, fleshed out to ..read more