Dear Reader,

As I write, it is Sept. 11, my birthday. Sept. 11 is not the best day to be wearing a shiny birthday hat and blowing out candles. But this week I hit on something: Use the cataclysm as a catalyst. So today, I call on all writers -- poets, prose… Read full post »

I would keep writing while traveling. We'd all be hanging out together. That was the idea. Not to write about death. Maybe The Problem of Focus and Boundaries in Writing. The gift of having an advice column. Now late at night in my silent hotel room

 I try to… Read full post »

Freeze. The familiar series of questioning thoughts and that old, familiar slumpy feeling of nothing to say and irrelevance.

OK. I came to Fort Walton Beach. OK, here is the thing. 

It was necessary to come to Fort Walton Beach, Fla., to help my brother help my dad. My dad broke… Read full post »

So my musician brother tells me this story about back when he'd just moved in to the Melrose Park house in Lauderdale and next door was a house full of skinheads with pythons in the shower stall. So one of the snakes gets sick and the skinhead drives it out to… Read full post »

The USO soldiers come and go with their shoulder patches and their boots and I consider the TGO Friday's vs. the Chilis vs. the Starbucks and find on the front porch of the TGO Friday's a snug little Samsung alcove with plush black leather chairs and an electrical outlet and try… Read full post »

and ... the elite and very special board, and those needing assistance board, and ... group 1 boards  ... group 2 ... group 3 ... group 4 ... and ... thank you for waiting group 5 boards ... and do I have any rolling luggage, and ... i made it, i… Read full post »

never fly again never fly again never fly again

never place my fate again in the incompetent hands of ...

Wait!

Gate 60 Miracle of interminable flight delay:

Look at the sunrise 7:04 a.m. over the mountains east of the Bay, look at the photo snapper in the Gate 60… Read full post »

On the road, in the airport, used to be you could cut it close, cutting it close was part of the thrill, you could run, you could catch the plane, not even cutting it close this time, arriving at 5:30 a.m. for a 6:05 flight, is that so unconscionable, but the… Read full post »

Could be me. Have a feeling it's Harper's.

Two things I'm doing. One, I'm organizing the Unemployed Writers Workshop in San Francisco. It's a free thing to keep writers's spirits up and such. You can ask me about that. We can do it together.

The other thing is the followup book: Stories from survivors of my advice about… Read full post »

Whatever wants to be written will be written. Whatever calls out to me will be a song. Whatever crosses the yard at night will be photographed and charted. Whatever crosses the sky will be remembered. Whoever speaks will be heard. Whoever listens will be repaid. Whatever clock is wound in the… Read full post »

And then I thought, my God, that is antisocial, blasphemous, scandalous! What business do I have? What business am I in? Who am I anyway? So I took it down!

I can't just do things like normal people. OK, well, time to eat.

Tell you what I don't mind saying after a long day in the mines I like to put my feet up and just go long day darlin get that broccoli pasta going and get the damn bird out of the dining room, damn thing showed up one day next thing i'm… Read full post »

Jane Smiley. 13 ways of Looking at the Novel. Jim Shepard. Like YOu'd understand Anyway. Bob Hickok's poems. Jose at the West Portal bookstore: his recommendations. good pix. quickBooks. Therapy. Workshops. Mailer's letters in the new yorker. Bench press for pecs. sauna. rotel receiver. Obama T-shirt… Read full post »

I just saw "W." and feel depressed. The two facts could be unrelated. That is the eternal possibility that renders opinions about movies less interesting than the contents of a human being's hopes and dreams at any given moment; what you had for lunch may be far more interesting than what… Read full post »

Right now, if you look at the far right of the photo currently on this blog, you can see the grossly distorted forehead of a man who looks like a conehead; the other grossly distorted and unrecognizable figures in that photo are my nephew David, my wife Norma, and my neice… Read full post »

So I had the pleasure of inflitrating the Tomales Bay Writers Conference at Marconi Wednesday night to hear the delightful Jane Smiley and purchase her wonderful book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel which I am enjoying at Java Beach as I contemplate with a growing sense of satisfaction and… Read full post »

So I had a lot of resistance to actually blogging in classic blogging style and still do but have decided to just go ahead and write as terribly as possible, or as honestly as possible, which might be about the same thing, i'm figuring, as to tell you the truth the… Read full post »

I'm supposed to be writing the column I write for Salon, which is what they pay me for, but some mornings it's so easy to get distracted by all the other stuff there is to do, and nobody's here monitoring me, so I'm sitting here in my downstairs office at home… Read full post »

Appreciate the ideas on the title, and I'm still looking for somebody who killed himself after I told him not to. That would be an  interview.
And naturally I have complex and conflicting interests. I do want to demonstrate to readers that it is possible to change your life,/… Read full post »

So. Well, the next book. The next book I think I will call

 Problem Solved: True Stories of [21] Real People who Reached a Crisis, Asked for Help and Changed Their Lives.

How do you like the title? Kind of ok, I guess. It gets the point… Read full post »

Really, it all seemed so absurd, the idea of blogging. And "weblog" was far preferable as a descriptive term. As aperson who writes slowly (contrary to published reports), carefully (yes, really) and mostly for money,
I dunno, blogging just didn't seem to offer much. It is so much work to write.… Read full post »