Today I carve another big notch on the age-stick. Today is my (mumble mumbleth) birthday and I’m feeling good about it. I must have achieved some pretty awesome wisdom by now, right? Yesterday I sailed out of Galesville on a Catalina 30, though, which was surely at least a little unwise, because there were storms all around us. But the radar showed them all passing northwest of us, so we risked a...
Two days ago, on Sunday, April 23rd, I spent the day representing the Maryland Writers Association at the Kensington Day of the Book Festival, a street party with live music, food trucks, live readings and plays, and several blocks of Kensington’s most downtown-ish street closed to traffic and lined with booths devoted to books and all the things related to books. (“Downtown-ish” because...
On March 18th from 1 to 3 in the afternoon I’ll be at the Kensington Row Bookshop with my friend Anita Nahal signing our books—My first book-signing event! I’ll post the flyer below. If you happen to be near Kensington that day, drop in.
A library parking lot just half a block away is being repaved right now. There are noisy machines out there, and people walking around in yellow safety vests, and the whole neighborhood smells like new asphalt. I like it.
A quiet house, a quiet world at five o’clock in the morning, and the quiet is a welcome respite from the relentless cheeriness of the last days before Christmas here. I have nothing against cheeriness. I like it. It’s friendly. And now, well into December, I welcome the music that is everywhere, in every store and restaurant and outside them on the sidewalks. I like music, generally: it’s a...
I walked along the Rock Creek paths today, through woods, walking in the shade of the trees where the wind was light but very cold. Walking is my only exercise since Covid pushed us all apart for a time. That’s one good reason to do it, even in the cold. But also, solitary walking is supposed to be good for creativity. I need that. I’m trying to make progress on another book about the Téuta. So...
I woke up this morning to fog—see the image below, showing the same scene out my back window that I offered as an image of rampaging autumn a few posts back. Evocative stuff, fog. I have to add it to a scene in the next book.
Halloween. A good time to write about the dead. And as it happens, I was just reading about a woman who is very experienced at being dead: she was Natufian, a group that lived around the eastern Mediterranean between about 15,000 and 11,500 years ago. They were a group in flux, a group that was transitioning from footloose foraging to sedentary farming. This particular woman was found in a cave...
Why is the muffled sound of a distant lawnmower sleepy and relaxing? In this case the lawnmower is operated by my neighbor, who has scoliosis and may be struggling, but still loves her lawnmower as a deep and somehow important part of who she is. She’s muffled by walls and at least some distance. Through the walls, at a backyard’s distance, the sound of her effort is a relaxation. Why is that...