I almost skipped the blog post tonight because… well, because it would be easier to skip it. Instead I decided to keep it brief and Public Service Announcement-like. I feel like if I plotted my stress levels lately, it would look like those graphs of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the past thousand or so years, with the past month or two being the onset of the Industrial Age. Too science geeky? Okay, how about this… When I was in college, and for whatever reason started running around like a crazy person, there was a guy who would, in Lloyd fashion (John Cusack in Read more…

I’m about to wrap up the rough draft of a novella, so of course I’m writing a blog entry instead. But, as I like to preface many of the things I tell my closest friends, “This [blog entry] is not a total non sequitur.” (Which implies that it is at least a partial one.) I was prompted to try a novella that follows my private investigator Sydney Brennan by two things: resistance in writing the second Sydney Brennan novel, and the Black Orchid novella award, a contest put on by the Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine for unpublished Read more…

I’m old enough that web design was not part of my primary education. I did some basic programming as a kid. You know, the kind of thing where you spend a couple of hours writing a “program” to do something that takes four seconds on a calculator. We had a computer class in high school using some now-defunct word processing program, but we also had a mandatory typing class. It was taught by a large elderly woman with a broken arm who meandered around the room yelling “KEY!!” whenever someone goofed off. Somehow I landed in the “bad boy” section Read more…