My earliest memories of being in Cincinnati involve camping somewhere on the outskirts of the city, going to a newly opened regional theme park called King’s Island, and then almost always ending up in Kentucky as my dad invariably missed the exit on the way to Riverfront Stadium for a Reds game. Remember, these were […]
Something happened on my way to having extra time on my hands when I retired. It feels like everything happened. Everything but having extra time, that is. At least until quite recently. Between giving more time to things I was already doing and picking up activities I hadn’t been doing, I feel like I’m at […]
When the troublemaking brother of the man in prison for a drunken crash that killed their parents is found stabbed to death in their restaurant, everyone in the small Irish village of Kilbane assumes it was one of the O’Sullivan clan who did him in. The blame falls squarely on oldest brother James, a hot-tempered […]
More than a quarter of a century ago, literally in a previous millenium, I interviewed for a job at a school I’d grown up hating. Having lived in south Parkersburg all my life and being an alumnus of Parkersburg South High School, the idea of working at Parkersburg High School was completely unthinkable. But I […]
I’ve read detective fiction for as long as I’ve been able to read, practically. I started with the classics: Holmes, Queen, Marple, Poirot. But then I picked up a new classic: Spenser. I’ve read others in the genre, including other characters created by Robert B. Parker. Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, and Parker’s Western heroes, Virgil […]
I recently went with Sarah to see the latest Tom Hanks movie, A Man Called Otto. All I knew was the little I could glean from the trailer and that people were upset because they had changed the titular character’s name from Ove to Otto. Well, and that it stars Tom Hanks, which is good enough […]
Last week, I talked about two fantastic restaurants my friends the Delgados took me to while I visited them in Georgia. Today, I complete the journey. The places I’m going to tell you about are definitely all on my list of places I must return to the next time I’m there. I’m going out of […]
When my good friends the Delgados moved to Georgia, it was definitely a sad time. I worked with Jonathan as one of his volunteers for our church’s youth group and Maria, known only to me as Pepper Potts, was, for all intents and purposes, my writing muse. She almost knows the characters in my books […]
Here’s a new excerpt from the book I’m doing heavy revisions on. And I mean heavy. Even the location is new. And so are the characters. Don’t be confused when you read, because names have been changed. But the characters are different in ways that go beyond their names. At any rate, here is a […]
Book titles are an interesting phenomenon. Some are strictly utilitarian–they are literally descriptive in some way, like Robert B. Parker’s The Godwulf Manuscript or Looking for Rachel Wallace or Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Others are all or part of a phrase or sentence drawn straight out […]