Category Archives: Writing

A source of inspiration. The poster was better than the film, however.

So. Sailing ships in space, eh? Frigates crashing into Mars? Where’d that come from, anyway?

Unemployment. Looking back, a successful stint of unemployment.

Backtrack to 2003. I had been laid off from my previous job and was on the dole inWashington,D.C., looking for a journalism gig. In order to get out of the house, I would go to Starbucks, crashing in a comfy chair and surfing for jobs for a few hours, all for the $1.50 needed to buy a cup of coffee. Continue reading →

Picture this scene. It’s a food court in the Houston airport, where we’re on a layover en route to Newark. My wife, Kate, is in line to buy us some Tex-Mex. It’s mid-morning, but five days in Cancun made it clear to us that Tex-Mex makes for an excellent brunch.

Suddenly, the big, heavy-set man next to her pipes up. “Is that wild man over there yours?” he asks in a thick Texas drawl.

Kate looks over to where I’m sitting with our daughter, Anna. We were quietly playing cards when she left us, but now I’m pumping my fists in the air, flailing about and barely containing the urge to jump up and down.

“Yeah, I think so,” she says, nonplussed. “I think he’s winning at Crazy Eights.”

It was, in the end, somewhat better than that. While going through Customs, I had received a phone call. Literary agent Sara Megibow, of the Nelson Literary Agency, left me a voice mail. She was offering to represent my novel.

My chances of seeing my book published had just gone from snowball’s-chance to quite reasonable. To commemorate this milestone, I bought a Houston mug from Starbucks.

Oh, yeah, by the way…I wrote a novel. More on that later.

My wife got me this t-shirt for Christmas. It fits, in many ways.

I’ve made a new writing contact, and she happens to “tweet.” For the uninitiated, that means she uses Twitter as a social network medium. She keeps track of her clients this way, announces business-oriented things, and generally uses it as a platform to further her career. And she does it in 140 characters or less, each time, a couple times a day or more.

I can’t do anything in 140 characters. OK, that’s not true, as I just managed to say I couldn’t do anything in 140 characters by using just 40 or so characters. That’s probably my first mental block — that I have nothing worth saying that can be somehow squeezed into 140 characters. Continue reading →