The Crotchety Old Man

Category: Writing

  • Stressed!

    Okay. I admit it. I’m stressed out. My upbeat, positive attitude has helped me to cope. But the quantity of major life events I’ve experienced this year has just about depleted the sunshine I’ve managed to set aside for dark and cloudy days. In graduate school I remember reading studies about a stress scale that…

  • Six and a Half Weeks Later

    On August 15th, I became a soon-to-be-published writer. The tidal wave I rode for several weeks has broken up into smaller waves, but I’m still very excited and busier than I’ve been since graduate school. An update on my journey is overdue. In truth, there hasn’t been a lot of action.  Dreamspinner Press (DSP) gave…

  • My Life as a Romance Novelist: The Weekend

    Panic motivated me to take the day off from work last Friday. Being a romance novelist is a lot more work than I knew. I needed a three-day weekend to get my act together. I spent most of the weekend in my recliner with two chihuahuas between my legs and a Macbook on my lap.…

  • What Have I Done Now?

    Since learning how to read, most the writers I know have dreamed about getting a book published. Not me. Until last year, the idea that I could write a novel had never even entered my mind. Writing fiction was on a rather long list of inabilities that I inherited from my mother. We can’t do…

  • Living on Cloud Nine

    I’m still happily ensconced atop Cloud Nine. Life is good here–full of promise and possibilities. I like it a lot. All I think about is Dreamspinner Press’s upcoming release of Until Thanksgiving–my first novel. Since Wednesday I’ve called or emailed everyone I know who isn’t on Facebook or Twitter, chatted with all my pals at the…

  • My Wildest Dreams

    I wrote Glass Houses in 2010 and thought it was an absolutely brilliant memoir. My first choice agent rejected the manuscript. Then I tried a small gay publishing house that also turned it down. Solid in my conviction that the manuscript was perfect, the problem had to be with the blurb, synopsis, and query letter.…

  • The Reviews Are In!

    Several years ago I started renting audiobooks from Cracker Barrel for road trips longer than about three hours. Then I started downloading them on my iPod Nano to listen to when I run. Now I’m in the middle of a book just about all the time. The hours I once spent reading books I now…

  • Hasten My Retirement

    Successful blogging tip number one: Never add blog posts on weekends. People read blogs on weekdays during working hours. Posting between two o’clock Friday afternoon and nine o’clock Monday morning is the blogging equivalent of masturbating–a solitary act that nobody will know about. Unless, of course, it goes viral on the internet. Advice for becoming…

  • Stop the World!

    Swapping the vacation my partner and I had been looking forward to for Dad’s funeral ended up being a good thing. We were already off work, and since we were driving anyway and had a free place to stay at the beach, changing our plans at the last minute didn’t cost anything. Any other time…

  • The Path We’re On: A Short Story

    Nobody could say they didn’t see it coming. Signs pointed toward the showdown back in 2000, when the GOP stole the election from the Democrats in an election that taught us about hanging chads. At the time, everyone thought the showdown would take the form of a hotly contested election. Nobody really thought things could…