It's like showing up at the beach in your dress clothes, but there's no wedding here. It's shocking to encounter school bell traffic and see so many school supplies in stores. (One of my kids has a friend whose passion is collecting school supplies--hope she becomes a teacher some day.)

August feels familiar. I’m the thing that’s out of place.

But what a sweet place to find myself in!

Creative Cross-Training

I write full-time. I've written yards of ad copy and miles of fiction, but lately I've been exploring this most abbreviated wonder: poetry. I now have about thirty, and though these poems aren't publishable, sometimes the exercise of it leaves my creative veins popping. Here's one of those thirty poems: Fighting Friction.

After decades of student essays, my dry, weary eyes now tolerate screens in just 20-minute sprints. So I cross-train right up above the writing bunker in my own home gym.

Sly Stallone buffed up for the role he wrote. So will I.

No roids for this dad bod. Just healthy doses of caffeine.

Gone Fishin'

Sometimes we feel we need excuses to reach out to people, and a good talk about writing is a good-enough reason (at least on par with fishing, any day). Recently I've met with three friends--call them beta readers, but they're first friends.

Each conversation showed me something different: where the story drags, where it surprises, and where I’d written more of myself into Ambrose than I realized. Just this week I had an amazing 90-minute visit with my editor friend over coffee. I think I learned more about my book (and myself) than I ever let on, but I hope that at least I expressed my gratitude.

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Zombie Awareness

What's been your exposure to the undead? For someone who wrote a zombie novel, my exposure to the undead has been surprisingly modest: maybe five novels and another five movies.

My original idea that has become The Unbecoming Remains was simply this: What are they thinking? It is an idea that plagues me when I see inert people, and no one is stereotypically more inert than a zombie. There, now you know the origin of what's become the saga of a cognizant zombie.