When There's No Sky Left

On Saturday, I realized I’m going to have to restructure the novel I’m working on, which means a lot of long days for a while. So, I hope you won’t mind if, for this post, I use an essay that was published a while back in THE LITERARY REVIEW (Farleigh Dickinson University), entitled When There’s…

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If you love books – a writer's plea

The dodo. Quite extinct, as books may well be, if reader’s don’t buy them. We all know how terrible the economic situation is right now. We’re all suffering. The same is true of the publishing industry, which hasn’t had a good year in quite some time now. Publishing houses are laying off staff, and closing…

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Civility, please come back

I was in a meeting this morning when the fellow leading the meeting said, “Now we’re in Princeton, so of course there are a lot of Really Important People here today, and no doubt they’ll be getting Really Important Phone Calls, you know, conversations that could not possibly wait an hour until this meeting’s over.…

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Even a heretic…

Last night I found myself in a committee meeting. I don’t really know why I was there, and possibly the other committee members were wondering the same thing. I’m not good in committees. I keep having opinions. Sitting on an organizing committee is sort of like working in an office, something else I’m not very…

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Creating the future self

Some years ago I saw a movie in which an older man advised a teenager to be careful about what he was doing, because he was in the process of creating, by his thoughts and actions, the man he would become — his future self. It stuck with me. Things do that. They plink down…

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