Recently, I’ve been struggling with fiction writing. While the desire to tell stories has returned, I’ve felt as if the ability to do so has fled. I know that this isn’t necessarily the case, but if there is one thing I have learned with this recent bout of–let’s call it what it is–writer’s block, it’s…
It just so happens that I am on vacation through the end of the year. Since what book I am reading often reminds me of what I was doing when I was reading it, I try to keep things a bit lighter when on vacation, although it doesn’t always work out that way. As we…
I’m climbing back into the blogging saddle. It’s a slow climb. At my peak I was writing multiple posts per day, and at times went years without missing a day. Those days are in the past, but I’ve been working up to posting 3 days a week. The slow climb began in September with a…
I recently began using a Bullet Journal. Longtime readers who recall my going paperless days might find this odd. My going paperless experiment was just that–an experiment to see how far I could go without paper. Eventually, I decided that there were good reasons (for me) to continue to use paper. I’ve been carrying around…
When I read book, I see what’s happening in my imagination. Over the years, I seem to have developed a stock of stages that serve as the default placeholder for many common settings that I come across. I call these stages the backlots of the mind. I was recently re-reading Stephen King’s novella “1922” which…
A few months ago, we started experiencing some problems with the cable box in our bedroom. It had served diligently for seven years there, and who knows how many years in other places prior to its arrival in our little abode. The cable people came out, examined it, and determined that it was an ancient…
Over on Instagram, I have been posting photos from various pages of my notebooks. I’ve been posting about one a day as a way of giving folks real-world examples of the kind of stuff that goes into my paper notebooks–much as I posted about the kind of stuff that went into my digital notebooks in…
I didn’t have a specific reading goal for 2018. That is, I didn’t say to myself, I am going to read 50 books this year. Way back when I started keeping my list of books in 1996, I did have a goal: Read one book per week. It seemed reasonable at the time, and yet…
Sitting on the sideline at my son’s basketball practice I was reminded of a mild malady from which I suffer: biblio curiositas. A medical dictionary might describe such an illness as a sudden, urgent desire to know what it is that person sitting next to me is reading. I’m paraphrasing, of course. Still, I find…
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not…