Too Beautiful

Lying beside you, after making love again, was bliss. You said my smile was like a Buddha's. A few years later, we laid on our backs i...

Here's why the Creative Commons license is a wonderful thing: a photograph of mine on Flickr showing a Bangalore street with a Hindu te...

A new fiction anthology from New Lit Salon Press entitled Southern Gothic has just been released, and it contains a short story of mine en...

The author Stephen King "spends 'months and even years' writing opening sentences" for his books, according to this articl...

Here's a picture of Cris and me on the porch of the rented house in Kansas City, Kan. the night before we flew back to San Francisco. M...

Yesterday Cris was uncomfortable all day with nausea. At 6:00 pm she asked me to google some search terms, and based on the results she deci...

This picture is our garden this morning. Much of the foliage is made up of two medium-sized ornamental cherry trees, though at the top you ...

In a dream: A woman who was an oracle or priestess of some kind was the guardian of a portal that was located in a cavern. The portal was a ...

A good friend, who writes under the name Amber Belldene , linked to a fellow writer's blog post about a recent release. The blog post is...

A travel piece in the New York Times last week goes to a remote Indian town founded by Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabinidrath Tagore. After v...

 

The following exchange was broadcast a little while ago on the BBC News Hour. The announcer, Owen Bennett-Jones, was interviewing former Bri...

Whenever I read about the screenwriting game, it always sounds to me like it's nothing more than understanding clichés as fully as possi...

I was reading a post about the film TAXI DRIVER on a cinema website and had gotten to the comments; in fact I made a comment of my own. I w...

This tweet crossed my Twitter feed. I don't know the originator, but as you can see it was retweeted by SFMOMA: SFMOMA, this seems like ...

With all the schadenfreude I can muster, I enjoy the uncovering of hoaxes and frauds. And the last week has been an exhausting carnival of r...

I've been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of tow...

Fragment of an otherwise unremembered dream from Sunday night which I wrote in the bedside notebook when I woke: The suffering would be imme...

Loved this. Personal writing should entertain the reader. (And by this I do not mean the voyeuristic train wreck entertainment that one gets...

The film segment The Heavenly Creature -- one-third of an anthology film titled "Doomsday Book," from three South Korean filmmake...

Because my employer urged me to -- it seems we are all being urged to "connect with customers" over social media, not that I have ...

Driving in the South of Market district this morning, I stopped at a traffic signal. I'd just been to the supermarket and then to a coff...

I've been hoping someone would look into this story for ages, ever since my fundie brother adopted two kids over 15 years ago and spoke ...

And then there is sound we can't hear — infrasonic. In 1998, a group of scientists working in a laboratory began to feel as if they were...

The current New Yorker has a fascinating and moving article by Joshua Foer about an amateur philologist named John Quijada. This middle-ag...

Earlier this week, news media in northern California and Oregon especially were focusing on the aftermath of a mall shooting in suburban Por...

On my way from San Francisco to Pocatello, where I'm heading to visit a friend who teaches at the university there, I stopped in Weed la...

There is no doubt that Texas is in dire need of a well-funded water plan, and lawmakers on both Republicans and Democrats appear ready to do...

It's well known that Dick really wanted to write "literary" fiction and, above all, achieve mainstream success. He wrote over ...

Flying from Austin to Denver yesterday on my way back from Texas, I could see the effects of the drought. While I was in Texas I was surpris...

It was amazingly cool this morning when I left the hotel -- 58 degrees. It felt so wonderful it lifted my spirits. For better or worse, I ...

I drove this morning to the Armand Bayou Nature Center [ map ; point A in the map below] outside Clear Lake City, where I went to high scho...

Woke up this morning in San Antonio. Weather was utterly dreary: thick fog and drizzle, just a complete mess. I found my way to a cafe with ...

I took a nice walk on the beach this morning in Port Aransas. Without really planning to, I walked down the beach all the way to the ship ch...

I left Austin late this morning. I couldn't resist just a little pass through town, but I limited myself to a few streets in South Austi...

I'm in Texas on vacation, and to research something for the novel I'm working on . When I tell people I've come to Texas to rese...

Pretty much: My job as a technical writer . I have been working at the same place on the same product, more or less, for five and a half y...

A few months ago I wrote about the trope often appearing in Patricia Highsmith's work -- that of characters following developments in th...

Poetaster: an inferior poet: Turner gives us an informative sketch for a bildungsromanabout how (Henry) Miller re-made himself as a writer...

(A) small thing ... happened somewhere between the uncorrected proof and the finished hardback (of Roberto Bolaño's final collection The...

They arranged to meet at a restaurant near the station. ... he looked at the signed photos of soccer players on the walls. The place had bee...

The tech company Zynga, which turns its customers into addicts to the extent that it calls its biggest customers "whales" -- the...

After she published her first novel, a friend of mine went back to the summer writer's conference where she'd workshopped a part of ...

In my job as a technical writer at a software company , a lot of my time is spent talking to developers and QA people about how a new featur...

One of the real wack jobs I follow is a guy who posts occasionally to a blog entitled (all caps, please) HELL ON EARTH . Today's post, i...

At Easter dinner, an interesting discussion cropped up. It started by someone asking why in the world someone would want to collect first-ed...

Very nice essay about/interview with Townes Van Zandt, the songwriter-singer who inspired a generation of Texas songwriters -- including me ...