Smooth is good. Rough is bad.
Is that so? Seems that way to me. I sure love smooth stuff. My crystalline spheres are smooth as glass. I can hold one in my hands and groove on the smoothness, rotate and slide the spherical smooth – sworchorsch my fingers across nothing and still feel it. Maybe that’s [...]

Have to say I’m no admirer of virtue. Virtue is just doing what other people tell you to do. If you do what they want, then you’re virtuous.
Same with respect. Respect is mainly just fancy ass kissing, having nothing inherent to do with truth or love or anything good. More social baloney, though I do [...]

Have you heard?
Is it just me, or is anyone else getting tired of hearing that something is the new something? First thirty was the new twenty. Then forty was the new thirty. Then forty was the new twenty. Then sixty was the new forty. Guess we skipped fifty.
We in the boomer generation like our years [...]

Man, it kills me how much it all depends on how you look at stuff. That totally sucks. You’d think something could just be a way and that would be it. But nooooo!
A good example is me. I look at myself and see a svelte, well-mustachioed tango artist with a cute butt. Other people look [...]

When the cold wind blows across the plains in winter, it brings partial thoughts, broken, crusty ones. The thoughts toss like infinitesimal tumbleweeds across barren gray dirt and dead tan grass, bouncing high in the wind, drifting past chilly thoughtways covered with snow and narrow canyons of stone time, past frozen streams, skipping, rolling, tumbling across [...]

That’s a quote from the writer Joseph Hansen, and I like it. Love weather. Lived in San Diego for a couple years and if you want to write a book with weather in it you might want to set it somewhere else. Nice, nice, and nice. That’s what I call yucky weather.
Give me a storm. [...]

I need to stop thinking so much. Since November I’ve been hitting this writer’s life thing pretty hard, and I’m buried in words up to my cranium. All I can think about is words. I see something I love or hate and boom, I’m suddenly buried in words, thrashing through symbols. I can’t even eat [...]

The present of the present. Now in a bow.
Thanks, time! Kind of you to stop by, though stop is the wrong word, since you never stop, or only in the dentist’s chair.
You just dropped by to drop a now, and now I have it and now it’s gone.
That totally rocked.
Bye!
LWIII

hatred is a funny thing
it hates the thing it
hates to hate
and hating hate
is not so great
since hate is hate
in every state
LWIII

This ain’t about peanuts, just didn’t know what to write about today and had to come up with a snappy title, or a nutty one.
So what’s up with old sayings these days? Just recently I had to explain both “easy as falling off a log” and “living high on the hog.” Maybe it’s the og [...]

Just discovered the secret to eternal life. Ponce de Leon was looking in the wrong place.
If you want to live forever just spend your whole life in the dentist’s chair. Ta da! Eternal life.
Oh okay, maybe not eternal, but it sure would feel that way. According to the calculations undertaken by yours truly at my [...]

Okay, today seemed rather unimportant in my heart and mind as I arose this morning, a day with middling prospects for joy, soul exploratoriums, and wisdom wonderings, a day filled with doing what I’d done before and didn’t like all that much – meaning writing when I didn’t feel like it.
So I decided to put [...]

Done ‘er. Just sent off the query letter. Have to say complaining in public before writing it was pretty effective. I only fainted twice. May have to do a little more in the complaining line.
Also, damn me, I told the truth. Why do I have to keep doing that?
Well, on her site she said, “Quirky [...]

(Sorry about the redundancy in the title, since any time you have to brag on paper about how awesome you are when you know you ain’t, it’s a tad hellish, unless you’re a used car salesman/writer.)
The first thing to do when writing a query letter to a publisher, literary agent, or editor, is to go [...]

Don’t blab or brag.
LWIII

Moron alert:

Well, I had an agent for about two hours. The smart people were right, darn them. Why do they have to do that so much? It was too good to be true, Shifty was really shifty, in a bad way.
My coach tuned me back into reality long enough for me to research the site [...]

Bingo. It happened. I’m now officially as annoying as I always wished I could be.
I have an agent.
Her name is Belle “Shifty” Cabal. Tough talker, skinny as a rail – though beautiful, in a you’re-skinny because-you-have-a-liver-problem-now kind of way. She wears a fedora and man’s pants with cuffs. Speaks low and husky, calls me ‘dahling’ [...]

I don’t like what you like. I like what I like. Is that bad?
One thing that bugs me (insert Andy Rooney here) is when people think that because I don’t like something that means it must be bad, or rather that I think it is bad. There are many things I don’t like that are [...]

Just watched that movie. Sacred geometry strikes again.

Funny how children and geometry mesh so perfectly in that flick. Must be all their synaptic possibilities. Don’t know when I was last so moved by a film, and don’t know why with this one. Maybe because I’m a children’s writer now. It’s like I watched it in [...]