In all of the blogs, articles, books, and groups on writing, most of the emphasis is on the affirmative path toward publishing, no matter the definition of publishing itself (indie, traditional, journal, etc.). I, however, am a fan of the avoidance method for success, otherwise known as the “Learn from My Mistakes” school of winningness. Type “avoid” into the search on this blog, and readers will be confronted with many posts on what not to do as writers and when trying to get noticed.
It should go without saying that one should not masquerade as another person, deny that such masqueradization is occurring, and then blame readers for noticing the hoax, but well, apparently it needs to be said to at least two people. They know who they are (they just don’t care). So in the interests of making a few rather blunt, you’d-hope-this-is-obvious information, I have the following bad ideas to list: Read More…
This whole life creation thing makes for an unpredictable voyage, and not just because Susanne and I have been coming at it from an alternative place—I get that not every baby started out with their parents combing through medical histories and sperm count data. And I hereby note, for what it’s worth, that I may hear some unusual rantings when our child is 14 or so about how they entered into this world, in the midst of their teenage angst. I’m okay with that. We’re still going to sit through the six-week course at St. Mary’s Hospital, with the pillows brought in from home clutched to our chests as we watch painfully accurate portrayals of live births on a wide screen in the training room. Vernix is a necessary substance, I’m sure, but it does not do wonders for anyone’s look. 
I’ve written about facing literary rejection before, in part because I’m a prince at receiving them, but since those days of yore several months ago, a new tendency has sneaked into the publishing world: the nonresponse.
I admit it: I was a touch fearful about talking to the doctor on Monday. I’ve got a short list of items about which most physicians get lectury, after all. But for the reasons I expressed in my last post, I needed to have a local doctor, so I was willing to lay it out there. Susanne declared it was a “test” of his cultural competency. I liked that as an approach enough.
My physical is tomorrow. I suppose most people call it an “annual physical,” but I haven’t had one in a couple of years because it’s been a while since I saw that physician. So it’s more my biennial physical, bordering on every 30 months at that.
Clearly, not everybody liked Fastforward, ABC’s sci fi series adapted from a Canadian novel that aired right after V, which had its own successful franchise history. But geez, I liked Fastforward. It was part mystery, part detective show—complete with fancy FBI offices and Courtney B. Vance—and it was heavy on the temporal destabilization, which I always enjoy. It had a huge cast of characters in the V spirit, even, and I liked the performances from Joseph Feinnes, John Cho, Jack Davenport (though he’ll always be Steve to me), and Gabrielle Union. But before anything too big could be revealed about what was going on, what Jericho really was up to, or what the next flashforward meant, ABC pulled the plug on the series.
I’ve driven through large swaths of Canada several times now—if I’d stitched them together they would pretty much connect the east and west coasts, except for the fact that I’ve never driven into Manitoba. That said, I have not driven in Canada much at all and for someone used to watching out for bands of small, white-tailed deer, Canada is a bit of a different game. In the way that junior varsity basketball players against NHL left wing players match up. Which is to say that they don’t. 
Perhaps Danny McGuinness had x-ray eyes, I’m not sure. But in one or two snaps of my right bra strap, he discovered the weakest link in the connection. Which, now that I think of it, was kind of the entire brassiere, because it was a fairly flimsy wad of cloth. In an instant the device was in ruins, and it collapsed underneath my dress, while I detected a note of relief from it. After being produced at the training bra factory, it probably expected to grace the shoulders of someone like Carolyn Westermann, not Maroon the Goon, and here I couldn’t even handle it for one week. 
Eighth grade, 1984. Enough of spring had popped through the soil that the scent of daffodils trickled up to the third floor of the Princeton primary school, which was set right up against busy Nassau Street. As the building was nearly 200 years old, we relied on cross-breezes for air conditioning, which, given that each classroom had windows on only one side of the room and given that New Jersey air does not come pre-conditioned, meant that we were all overheating on a regular basis at some point after April 6. Our core temperatures, however, to a great degree reflected our disparate uniform code: boys could wear thin polo shirts once winter was over, but the girls’ dresses were heavy and scratchy, not much of an improvement over their woolen vests and kilts.
Trans/plant/portation 