I Don’t Know What To Tell You: Grief Week 5

One of the hardest things about losing a loved one, is the feeling of strangling, lingering grief and loss at, not only things you used to do together, but things you had planned to do together. Do you go ahead and do them alone? With someone else? Are the things you used to do together […]

American Values — Good Works (viendo el bien que ustedes hacen)

I asked my kids what they thought the most important American Value was, trying to get a feel for what kids thought about these sort of things, and they both gave me the same answer: Good Works, BUT… They both meant something different by it. So I will address both in this post: When my […]

Evolution of a Sidekick – Why Does A Hero Need One?

Why does a hero need a sidekick? I think we can sum this up PERFECTLY by going to the first story to introduce a sidekick: The Creation Genesis Chapter 2 20 …. but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. 21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon […]

Have We Lost The Art of Conversation?

This was the question posed by an opinion piece in the New York Times on Sunday April 22. I ran across it thanks to a ‘freshly pressed’ blog here on WordPress. Read that article, then read the comments below, and you’ll wonder what sort of hell we have stepped into. But I have to tell […]

We Are All Sinners

Writers have definite rules. We have Commandments, as I illustrated a few posts ago. Unfortunately, we also have heretics, sinners, apostates (not to be confused with apostrophe’s) and zealots. It is easy to become one of the aforementioned because not only are the commandments constantly changing–what edition are we on the Chicago Style?–they also contradict […]

Thou Shalt Not – Commandments of Writing

There is nothing harder for a true believer in the Word, than discovering that you might be guilty of serious blasphemy. Such was the case for me while an acquaintance was reviewing a manuscript for me. I was informed that you can’t use contractions in the narrative. This came as quite a shock to me. […]

Perspective – And How It Feels To Be A Writer

In the book “Misquoting Jesus,” the author remarks about how an event is portrayed four different ways by four different people. He asks himself “Which way did it really happen?” He never admits to himself that it actually might have happened four different ways, all based on the perception of the person who is giving […]

The Machine and the Adversary

The Machine (How politics is a tool of the Adversary) In the movie, The Matrix, the hero was plugged into a machine that let him live out his own personal fantasy while it fed off his energy. The machine had many workers, smaller machines that worked for the same goal. Drugs kept the living […]