London To Rural New York

Surprise from the United States...

My Choice

Don't get me wrong, I love book sales. However, I don’t care how many books I sell. I never have cared about that, really.

Generations

What prompted this post is it dawned on me this morning that I have done something that I had not really intended to do when I started this "project" early in 2016...

Human Being Online

Clearly those who allow social media not to supplement life and expand their personal horizon, but instead to encroach on living face an issue that they may need to address.

For All The World To Read

As you probably know I no longer tweet. However, I do like to "dip into" what I see Twitter writers/authors at its #writingcommunity hashtag are throwing out there for possibly all the world to read. I did so again yesterday and thought I would share a few here...

State And Church In The USA (Yet Another Subject That Needs To Be Better Taught In School)

She reminds me of former students of mine who saw something they did not like and were glibly sure they had an "easy" answer. (Because, you know, no one ever considered THEIR idea before, right?)

To Do, Or Not To Do

A change of pace: an afternoon (UK time) post. Why? Because I have seen a few things in recent days I thought worth addressing here and I also chose just to surprise you at a new time. LOL!

The Opera Singer

That couple, now in their mid-80s, had been at our wedding in 1999, but I had known them since then only passingly. The husband is a retired opera singer originally from Wales, and as we chatted and I realized he was happy to talk about his career I encouraged him to do so by asking him lots of questions...

And When Darkness Descended…

It was like Lord of the Flies. We - almost all boys - carried eggs and shaving cream to attack other boys for whatever reason. I went out one year with comedian Steve Martin's arrow through my head as my entire costume...

“1899” Was ***NOT*** The Good Old Days

How about history? The internal combustion engine on which we now rely simply cannot be viewed in isolation without any thought given to what had been before it. It is not as if it had not existed we would all dwell in immaculate urban pedestrianized New Yorker-style cartoon locales where everyone is cycling and doing yoga and going to therapy.

Train, City, Cathedral, Swans, And A Spanish Princess

We were out and about on Saturday with friends from Bristol. One had never been to Peterborough. We told him, well, he ain't lived until he had seen Peterborough.

The Machine Reads

I have used the Kindle text reader on all of my books post-publication. My personal opinion: I have always felt my novels sound better when read aloud by a woman's voice.

The Entertainer

By the way, I swear if you ever publish or "mine" from one of my emails here, I will murder you...

“Fiction comes from fact…”

Angry emails now started to fly between them, public accusations started to be hurled back and forth, friends jumped in to defend both, something from one of them (I forget which) ended up I think in the Boston Globe newspaper (honestly, by then I was losing the will to live reading about this)...

She Was 90

Her parents came over in the 1920s from what is today the Republic of Ireland. She had also spent some of her childhood back there, including some of early World War II, under the care of an aunt. To the end of her life, those childhood years living in Ireland were special and happy memories for her...