Category: Immaculate Deception

• Summer Reading Can Still Be Foundational Reading

  So I spent a good portion of the spring and early summer slogging through an exceptionally dense non-fiction tome on Napa Valley that was serving as background for a large…

• Funky Friday Music to Make Your Escape By

  When music people pray, this is the sort of thing that they pray for. It’s cool enough to have Elvis Costello and ?uestlove in the same room, but to have…

• A Little Midweek Perspective

  See that black thing up in the corner? That’s Saturn, with its rings evident toward the top of the frame. And that tiny dot with the arrow pointing to it?…

• The Lawnmower: My Nemesis, My Muse

  Thanks to the borderline monsoon conditions we’ve been experiencing on the East Coast so far this summer, I’ve gotten exactly zero reprieve from my weekly task of lawn length maintenance.…

• Hulk SMASH deadline!

  I was in full-on magazine writer mode today. Cranked out 1,300 quality words for a freelance story with the able assistance of my neighborhood Cosi, their free wi-fi, and the…

• Sci-Fi Author Richard Matheson Speaks to What All Authors Hope For

  Science fiction author and screenwriter Richard Matheson died this week, having contributed immensely to the sci-fi canon with some of the best loved episodes of The Twilight Zone and the…

• Because It’s Monday, You Need a Lego Freddy Mercury

  Suddenly, I feel the need to sing “Somebody to Love” really, REALLY loud.

• A Barbecue-Basted Lesson in Creating Honest Characters

  What you see here is a bottle of barbecue sauce. With it I will give you some tips on writing compelling and honest characters. Why barbecue sauce, and why specifically…

• …. And No Disco Dancing

  Just returned yesterday from a week of communing with The Mouse and about a billion of his disciples. More thoughts to come, but this was worthy of individual note.

• Jak Smyrl and the Joy of the Picasso Napkin

  There’s an old story about a woman who approached Pablo Picasso in a cafe and asked him to draw her something on a napkin. However, before he would give it…