I don’t know what all this business about family togetherness and keeping fingers of phones at the table is about. My family watched TV at dinner. From six o’clock to seven, pre-prime time, were all the syndicated sitcoms from the house that Generation X built. Murphy Brown, Designing Women, America’s Funniest Home Videos, Empty Nest, Growing Pains, Night Court. And The Wonder Years. I didn’t know it at the time, but The Wonder Years was for my parents what The Goldbergs is for me — a sitcom that capitalizes on nostalgia and trying to convince oneself that the pop culture was more meaningful than it was (in this case, that…
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The Books I Read: July – August 2014
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain I would love to see this as a documentary. The book itself gets a little long. But it’s comprehensive, that’s for sure. Like a Beethoven symphony, it covers all the possible ideas. Now for those people who think this book will help with their introversion, well… the best thing the author does is tell you that your introversion is normal. You are not abnormal, you just have a different way of thinking. There are strengths and faults to introversion, just as there are strengths and faults to extroversion. The problem is that some time after…
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The Books I Read: November – December 2010
Ariel by Steven R. Boyett This is the kind of book I want to write. They say if you can come up with one truly original idea, you’ve accomplished a great deal. I know I’m no good at that, but I love genre-mixing, both writing it and reading it. Ariel is one of those books that is actually urban fantasy. Not oppressed vampires, bare-chested werewolves, and leather-bound bounty hunters. A unicorn and a boy journey from Atlanta to New York, surviving the apocalypse. There are dragons and gryphons, and there are skyscrapers and cans of beef ravioli. It’s a got a street-smart unicorn and a samurai swordsman. I can tell…
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My First Fan Letter (that I wrote, not one I received)
I don’t really like to write letters to people I don’t know. I don’t feel any need to try and interact with people I look up to. I figure they’re so high up there, they don’t need me interfering. Plus there’s always the awkwardness of that caste difference. What would Stephen King have to say to me? I haven’t published one novel, and he’s killed an entire forest. But there was one author I felt like he was accessible enough to write to–Barry Lyga. He’s the guy who wrote “The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl”, the one that made me think about “Blood: I Live Again” (which I…
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What I Got For X-Mas
Well, Christmas is over and done with and I couldn’t be happier. I’ve never worked so hard on a Christmas vacation. Over the four days I got off, I had to shovel the driveway each day, mop the floor, vacuum all three floors of our house, spent four hours putting together a kitchen playset, set up a weather station, cook a 16 pound turkey with delicious White Castle dressing that was meant to be for 14 people, but only three showed up because of the weather, so no one got to taste how awesome the stuffing was (nor appreciated any of the other stuff we did, plus having to take…
