One of the five offices in the charming 1910 Raleigh house where I work has been transformed. The room or half the room can be rented by the week or the month, by a writer or anyone else needing a place to work quietly within a small creative community. Above you see Desk One in […] Read More

A couple of times, in answer to requests, I’ve promised pictures that I didn’t immediately deliver. I guess I should say I’m making semi-good on the promises, since I’ve come up with only picture in each category. This first one is a piece of the road from where I live toward the first stretch of […] Read More

I seem to have fallen off quite a lot in my frequency of posting. Partly because I’m so busy. And also I haven’t had sufficient impulse. It’s easy to get out of the habit. Not sure whether to let the rate sag until I feel like boldly opining more. Or to keep myself cranked up […] Read More

Almost finished cramming five days of work into four. Such are the perils of taking time off. Seems that I don’t plan and schedule in a very self-protective way. I’ve never thought of planning as a bold activity. Quite the reverse. But I’m starting to see that it could be. It would involve my taking […] Read More

Here’s a most inspiring post from uber-blogger Seth Godin. It’s similar to the change-by-making-a-series-of-tiny-changes approach of kaizen posted about here earlier. Godin’s idea is to be amazingly bold and excellent for a mere five minutes a day. To do that much can rock the world. I agree with him on all except his last line. […] Read More

Y’all, I have always loved giving talks. What I mean by a talk is standing up and telling 30 minutes of war stories, plus reading a few pages from one of my novels and then taking questions. What’s not to love about doing that? This morning, however, I went to a session at a Duke […] Read More

Someone sent 2,096 of my friends and colleagues an email Friday trying to sell electronics devices. If the message made it past your spam filter, sorry for the intrusion. I discovered this state of affairs tonight–didn’t pay much attention to my email over the weekend. But I stayed unusually cool…all on account of an inspiring […] Read More

The long-scorned tabloid, The National Enquirer, is reportedly in the running for a Pulitzer prize. The Pulitzer folks have allowed them into the race, submitting the stories that broke the John Edwards story. (This news was broken by the Huffington Post and then reported in The New York Times, and of course The Enquirer.) The […] Read More

Steve Almond, the guy who wrote Candyfreak (and how could a true candy freak be anything but virtuous and wholesome?), has an interesting piece on The Rumpus about self-publishing a book of one-page pieces that he couldn’t rouse a lot of industry interest in. What he’s doing is mainly selling it through his readings,making it […] Read More

Flipping through an old Allure magazine a few nights ago (I’m into Old Allure), I came across a breakout quote that seized my attention: “…il fuoco nelle vene….) which means “fire in the veins” and refers to living with passion. The story was about the style of Italian women, at least some of the more […] Read More