Sharpen your pencils—assuming anyone does that anymore—and whip out the ballots for that Oscar pool you reluctantly agreed to enter. Use my yearly cheat sheet and no one will suspect you’re behind on current movies. You may even pull off the win. Best Picture American Fiction Anatomy of a Fall...
Travel fuels many of my stories. While a reader might pick up a book because they find a new setting appealing, it’s the people on the pages that drive them to read late into the night. After this year’s Berlin Marathon, I took advantage of the interconnected European train system and headed to...
When asked, writers often admit that even their best work never quite matches the richness of the story in their head. That’s true for me, too. That being said, travel is the magic bullet that helps me capture the layers and nuance of the real world to make it part of my fictional world. Meeting...
This is my original copy of Julie Garwood’s THE BRIDE. It’s a book that changed the course of my life. At the time, I was in law school and simultaneously working on a graduate degree in political science. I craved reading a book that would give my overtired brain a break. I saw this in a...
Here we go again! Each year I post my predictions for the Academy Awards. I have a far better track record here than predicting who’ll win any given sports tourney. If your office or friend group does an Oscar pool and you want to participate, but don’t have a clue what to pick in each category,...
Do not, under any circumstances, look to me for help with your March Madness basketball pool, either on the women’s or the men’s side. My brackets were dead in the first two hours of play. However, if you have a ballot waiting in your inbox to participate in an Oscar pool, that’s my wheelhouse....
When Tipper arrived, she wasn’t much bigger than a large cup of Dunkin’. For nearly fifteen years, her routine was our routine. She walked up to six miles a day, which was very good for her people. She cuddled as close as possible during my writing time, often putting her face between my hands and...
Certain words spark feelings of apprehension. Precipice. Diagnosis. Shark. Infinity. Pregnant. Change. With the notable exception of shark, most of us face the rest at some point in our lives. After thirteen years on Blogger, The Go-Ahead is moving to WordPress. It’s a change, but rather than...
