Re: The Night Whiskey

Originally presented in Salon Fantastique, and available in other collections, “The Night Whiskey,” by Jeffrey Ford steadily draws you in. The narrator, Ernest, begins with practicing how to poke dummies out of trees with a stick. If he misses or they fall badly, his mentor, old man Witzer spits and says: “That there’s a cracked […]

Re: Love and Death in the Time of Monsters

I have mixed feelings about “Love and Death in the Time of Monsters,” by Frank Wu. It has a great title. The presentation on Escape Pod is fun. But I have to say I preferred the realistic elements to the scifi elements.

Goldfinches

The coneflowers are now way past bee fodder. The seed heads are ripe, which means now the coneflowers are feeding goldfinches. So long as the regular feeders are full of black oil sunflower, it’s easy to keep the cats entertained with flocks of sparrows and house finches. (And yes, I’m afraid that is how they […]

Re: The Writer’s Book of Hope

The first hope offered by The Writer’s Book of Hope, by Ralph Keyes, is that no one can tell who is going to make it as a writer. Therefore you should encourage all aspiring writers. The next hope is a bit darker: that it’s okay to get all worked up about how hard it is […]

Re: Charlotte’s Web

I’ve been enjoying the On Character series that NPR did over the summer, but the only one that spurred me to read anything was the entry about Charlotte A. Cavatica. So I checked out the 50th anniversary edition of E.B. White’s reading of Charlotte’s Web, and spent a few afternoons rediscovering this old favorite.

Re: The Ant King

I seem to be a Benjamin Rosenbaum fan. I enjoyed listening to the silly, dotcom picaresque of “The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale” from the absurd beginning. Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, […]

I am writing a lot!

September 3 is my writing anniversary. Since that day in 2000, I have written or revised a bit of fiction every day, but it’s always been a struggle to actually get it done. At the beginning of August I was skeptical that writing at a scheduled time, as advised in How to Write A Lot, […]

Re: The Tooth Fairy

Telling us a variant on Pratchett’s multiple tooth fairies, “The Tooth Fairy,” by Jeffrey Valka sounds exactly like the absurd thing a father tells his kids just to mess with them. Like Calvin’s Dad. You might feel like you’ve heard this sort of thing before, and then the last line of the story turns the […]

Spatchcock turkey

You know summer is over when the bags of charcoal have migrated out of the meat department into hiding under the checkout lanes. Don’t they know Labor Day is your last chance to barbeque? That’s what I was thinking, looking at my huge Weber. It hardly seems worth firing it up for just a couple […]

Tomato, tomato, tomato

Today a monarch flew right in my face and danced off laughing at me. Has it been watching Venture Brothers? Meanwhile, my one tomato plant, Early Girl, has cluster after cluster of sweet nuggets that get redder by the hour. And the volunteer tomato is nearly ready for a taste test. I see lots of […]