As a novelist who hopes to be published someday, I no longer write reviews that are critical. If I can’t muster four or five stars, I just skip writing the review on Goodreads. These writers are published. I am not. By the way, a four-star review from me is still very good. Since I first made it through Green Eggs and Ham, sitting at a Kaufmann’s lunch counter in Pittsburgh with my mom, I have read thousands of books over the past 67 years. Four stars and you’re in the top 20 percent. Five stars and you’re in the top 10 percent. I just gave five stars to Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow an ..read more

People ask me this question all the time. The first person who asked it turned out to be a New York book editor. It was the first night of our MFA residency at Drexel University, and I could not coherently answer her question. Once I realized to whom I had babbled, I spent the evening beating myself up and not enjoying the Mexican buffet with my fellow students. In my defense, I had only written about 18,000 words at that point, enough to get myself into the program, and the original nebulous synopsis in my head turned out to be way off. Now I have completed the first draft of the manuscript a ..read more

April may be the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot. But January is definitely the longest. It’s a wintry, gray, wet slog. How do you make it even longer? Sign up for Dry January. I experienced a pretty “wet” December; we had some gatherings with neighbors, and I drank much more wine than usual. I also discovered the Maker’s Mark Old Fashioned while on vacation in Nashville. All that drinking made me feel puffy and sluggish, and I just wanted to get it out of my system. Now I have come out the other side and survived to see February. I thought I might lose a couple of pounds. Nah. But the ..read more

When I wake up, I think about 4,500 words. When I am working out. When I am watching TV. When I am eating a meal, which is usually contemporaneous with watching TV. They don’t write themselves, you know. As the week goes on, I add up the cumulative number of words written. Am I ahead? Behind? Right on schedule? Because on Saturday, I have to upload 4,500 words to my Drexel MFA professor. And it’s only week two of the quarter. Welcome to Novel Writing Intensive, one of the two electives I am taking this Winter Quarter at Drexel. The other elective is Query Writing Intensive; although that instr ..read more

Part 1 of an occasional series. At 66, I don’t have any major regrets. The closest thing to an Official Major Regret is never writing that novel percolating inside me. And now I am about to at least write it, as a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts program at Drexel University. Graduate school at my age is probably noteworthy enough to blog about. No creative writing, not even a paragraph, has issued forth from my keyboard since circa 1976. And back then, it was a portable typewriter on Corrasable Bond paper with a chaser of Liquid Paper on the side. That was at the University of Texa ..read more

The two great-grandkids, 9 and 6, had a wonderful time. I have to get that out of the way. As a mature adult, I realize that 85% of this trip was about the kids having a wonderful time. And they did. Did I mention that? They did not, however, know what was going on behind the scenes at the Happiest Place on Earth. So here is where I say, to parents and grandparents, please consider dropping $10,000 over six days somewhere else. Or spending half of that amount in some wondrous, non-artificial scenic someplace like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or the Blue Ridge Mountains. The selfish grownup ..read more

We are going to Walt Disney World in Orlando in February 2022. I thought I better start sharing my experiences helping to plan this trip. In the year 2000, Sue and I took the grandkids – Shelby and Ryan – to Walt Disney World. Yes, there was a spreadsheet involved, but all in all it was a simpler time. Sue acted mostly as sherpa holding on to our stuff and collecting Fast Passes because “Pirates of the Caribbean” was as wild a ride as she could stomach. Fast forward to 2022. Sue is 75 and I am 65. We are tagging along on granddaughter Shelby’s trip later this month to Orlando with two great-gr ..read more

Throughout the pandemic, we have observed a range of behaviors from people our age. I know a grandma just recently recovered from breast cancer who flies out west to visit loved ones and travels regularly with her significant other. Another couple who regularly entertain the unvaccinated grandkids and have taken multiple Road Scholar trips. An urban couple who have remained in virtual lockdown the entire time — no haircuts, Instacart and takeout only. She would chide us just for going to the grocery store, even though we always went at 6 a.m. and masked up. This is the couple with whom we made ..read more

Music – so-called Christian “praise” music at that – is turning out to be a spiritual lifeline of sorts these days. I did not see that one coming. About a year ago, I announced a break from Christianity, the institution. Over that period, we attended our church a handful of times under COVID conditions – outdoors, with masks, and no singing until that brief respite in July. It wasn’t the same, duh. During that time, my beliefs and practices have flagged even more. They are hanging by a thread. Evangelical Christianity is a scourge on our society, and I really can’t divorce myself from that cul ..read more

My family is fragmented, and the most immediate members of it are and were broken in many ways. My father, and his father, were scoundrels at best . . . I won’t go into what they were at worst. At any rate, dysfunction caused me to not care, rather belligerently, about my family roots. When I saw people gleefully discovering their history on Ancestry.com, I scoffed. Who cares? I asked myself. I didn’t even know what my ethnic roots were, other than vaguely German because my mother’s maiden name was Ersch and her father was Adolph. She was born and grew up in the German enclave of Fredericksbur ..read more