A friend sent me a speech from Dr. Martin Luther King. The writing preaches that we’ve lost our faith that God is able. I was unfamiliar with King’s writing, but it helps to have the… Read More »Where King Leads Us to Ability
I take comfort that at least machines, and perhaps wayward authors with long-ago books, are finding my work. Life is lived between these poles in the world of being an author, the writer who releases books and builds web pages to get them discovered.
Just this week, several months after Sins of Liberty was first released, a reader connected to find out more about her family.
Our recollection of things as we learned to love them can act like a snagged anchor when we sail into a new channel.
I counted away the years from his death like when we’d count off to start hide and seek. At last in my hide and seek, I opened my eyes and the memories of Dad were nowhere to be seen.
I am from Kroger sliced baloney. From K-Mart windbreakers and GI Joes and soda pop glasses from the Gulf station that were giveaways when you filled up your tank. I am from the one-and-a-half story housing tract bungalow with a picture window and a finished basement where the hot glue scent and the smoke from a soldering iron rose up together.
A quarter-million words is what you get if you’re writing four sentences a day for eight years. The total might feel like the accomplishment of your life. A quarter-mil can also haunt you and taunt you, depending on how close you get to revisions.
My father taught me to respect electricity. Like it was the Pope, to us Catholic boys, but a Pope who could reach out and smack you dead.
We need authors to tell their stories of success and their struggles. While listening closely, I try aligning my circumstances and experiences with the author’s. What sort of life did they launch from, in order to attain the orbit of their career? I hear about education, mentoring and family help, their alliances with other artists. It’s all too easy to add these elements to a pile I can call privilege. Private prep school, colleges whose student body is well-off, parents already in the arts and creative careers.
This adding up rarely motivates me, although it could light a fire under all of us.
Joe visited one day when Nicky was away at school. The housekeeper and butler were on duty, but they didn’t know who this priest was—a priest could go anywhere with no questions asked, a little like a policeman. Only Catholics worried about them.