It’s nothing too terribly fancy, but I love it. I can’t tell you why. I found twelve of them at my mother’s house in a back room, drooled a little, and asked her where she’d found them. She said “Big Lots” and “a while ago”. A dated church bulletin crammed down in between the pages of the top one on the stack revealed what “a while ago” means. We’re talking 1993 here, folks. (At her church, that’s two or three pastors ago, even.) They’re slim, they’re comfortably floppy, they’re probably theme books, and there are hieroglyphics everywhere on the cover, but no company name to be found. They are each saddle-stitched in a (removable? Not mine, so I didn’t try too hard) vinyl slipcover, and there are maybe, maybe, 20-30 pages in each of these babies, max. I want some. They make me want to write quick short stories with a definite ending instead of the long rambling stuff I always start in Word docs on my computer and never finish. They also would work with my left-handedness, and not many journals actually do. Help me out. Where can I buy these? (And no, don’t think my mother will give me one for a...

They’re there, but you have to look.

I read a lot (a lot, a LOT) of marketing blogs, and those folks can take themselves waaay too seriously.

What would you share in conversation if you could go back in time and meet yourself as a child?

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories…

Side 1: Who are these people who want to teach the N-word to our children? Side 2: Who are these people to mess with the classics?

These are God’s adjectives.

Rejected? No problem. Rejected again? Anger. Denial. Insanity. T.H. Mafi’s take on the classic cycle of a writer’s ego.