Category: Uncategorized

I’m sharing the first few pages of a first draft (unedited, unrevised) of a novel I’m working on, for now titled Octothorpe. I did a five-minute cover mockup, too. Don’t take it for actual artwork.

Below, three signs I saw a few months ago. (Hint: They’re all water-related.) Perhaps these mean Be careful on these old stairs, because they’re crooked. This is a safe neighborhood, so no need to lock your door. The containment dome for this nuclear reactor is leaking, and we’re advising you to high-tail it out of…

(With a shout-out to a fun movie, of course.) Of course, listing the statutes one could break only makes the sign more official, I guess….

For years, I’ve “known” the story of how Graham Nash first harmonized around a kitchen table with Stephen Stills and David Crosby. Joni Mitchell’s table, in fact, she being one of the Ladies of the (Laurel) Canyon. Until I read today something Stills said about the meeting: “I wouldn’t have sung in front of Joni…

Yesterday I put a new screen protector on my phone, after the original willingly laid down its life to save my screen. No instructions. Not in words, anyway. Just a video link. This must be a getting-old(er) reaction, but I can read a lot faster than I can watch. In addition, since the phone should…

In quotation marks? Is it a metaphor? The CEO’s mission statement? A line from a play (“To eat or not to eat..”)? I think it’s their corporate slogan. Maybe they’re encouraging hunger strikes against them.

I now have an official Reader’s Card at the British Library. I’m researching what little is known about a few people around the theater scene in late 1603 / early 1604. Truth is, anyone can get a Reader’s Card, which allows you to request all sorts of books and documents that mostly aren’t available in…

Dartmouth cattle and wild Dartmoor horses – my book research for the day. (At this point, I think The Precise Man will be set entirely in London, but research is research, right?)

*Weird to my Western ears, at any rate. Theremins was a cool answer in this morning’s NY Times crossword puzzle. The theremin is forever linked with The Beach Boys and “Good Vibrations,” which to my mind is the most memorable use of a “weird” instrument. Not only can I not imagine the song without it,…

That’s all. Yeah, it may not be his actual birthday, but a) it’s close and b) scholars like the symmetry of his birth and death being the same date, “by accident most strange,” as Prospero puts it in The Tempest.