Mercy (an excerpt from a novel-in-progress)
I hope the deer was the last thing Cory saw, not the pickup truck careening toward him, and I hope his eyes were wide and soft with pleasure. We’re here to teach our children and grandchildren, I know that. But sometimes we see things through their eyes and...
On Hunting and Metaphor
IN SEASON I need bullets, he said, only one left in the chamber, and headed toward the house when by chance I spotted it in the back field, near the woods that drop down to Rush Run, the creek like a vein through our farm, and shouted to him, though a shadow...
Men Are Hilarious
My 97 year old father-in-law has always said, "One boy is one boy but two boys are half a boy." He doubtless developed this theory because he had two sons 18 months apart. After five years of that fiasco, he and his wife must have been desperate to improve the...
Do The Right Thing Even If You Look Like An Idiot
Have you ever tried to do what you were pretty sure was the right thing only to have it explode? Even have two other seemingly sane and intelligent people tell you yes, you should do it before you went ahead and did that thing that exploded? So here's the story. It...
“Make It Mean Something”
The sky and air felt charged this week when I walked Hannah and Maggie, the chocolate Labs. The moon was already up while the sun hung low and cool in a fading denim sky. Too early for twilight! The scent of crushed leaves was strong as the dogs hunted in the dry...
On Zusak, Gadhafi and Surprise
An unexpected ludicrous moment, a twist into tragedy, a flash of tenderness: surprise by a character is a crucial element of a riveting story. Speaking yesterday at the College of Mount Saint Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, Marcus Zusak discussed this as well as...
And Then There Were Three
No fault of the chicken gynecologist’s, but Meg didn’t make it. She'd seemed much better shortly after the stuck egg removal by Nik and bathtub treatment by Diana, but then she worsened steadily over the next couple of days. Desperate stabs at word combinations on...
The Chicken Gynecologist
Here’s another story about the urban chickens. I have to admit that research for the next novel is accumulating much faster and more conveniently than material for the one I'm currently writing. On which I should be concentrating. But we’re in the first crisis with...
Write What You Don’t Know
Everyone's heard the line, "Write about what you know." If I only wrote about what I know, I'd have run dry years ago. It's learning a subject that I've stumbled on and become fascinated with, and discovering how it fits with a story idea in my head that keeps me at...