Category Archives: Uncategorized

So part of the charm of having satellite TV is watching films (usually late at night, when I can’t sleep) that I would never see in the theatre, but what the heck. Who made this movie The Strangers, and why? … Continue reading →

So a couple weeks back I was in the desert of West Texas near Big Bend National Park, staying at the house of park ranger Marcos Paredes, who was the model for one of Nevada Barr’s characters in her new … Continue reading →

While doing research on a pandemic angle of a novel I’m writing, I stumbled across two nonfiction books that offer some useful context for the recent outbreak of Swine Flu: John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The story of the … Continue reading →

Nathaniel Philbrick is on a roll: Several years ago he won the National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea (2000), about the wreck of the whaling ship Essex, which was staved in by a whale in the … Continue reading →

I’m glad to see that my comments on Stephen Graham Jones’ Ledfeather have drawn much attention on the site, and next on my reading list is his (other) new novel, The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti. (He also just told … Continue reading →

So there’s an article in the Washington Post today (I found it here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30360872/) about dust storms becoming more common in the West, with threats of a new Dust Bowl by mid-century, which fits my new novel, The Bird Savior, which opens … Continue reading →

You always hear how the past haunts the present, like Faulkner’s oft-quoted adage about the South, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Here in backwoods Colorado the past haunts the West, partially in the frontier … Continue reading →

So I recently finished Fawn Brodie’s biography of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, and I rank it as one of the best biographies of an historical American figure I’ve ever read, although T.J. Stiles’s Jesse James: … Continue reading →

Driving west-northwest across Texas from the Gulf Coast is like viewing landscape-as-economic-chart. First you pass through the lively, jumping hives of San Antonio and Austin, where the Depression doesn’t seem evident, the freeways full of pickups and new cars driven … Continue reading →

So here on the Texas coast of Mustang Island, where I misspent my highschool years and where the wind blows like a hurricane on any given day, which is today, naturally, we’re chasing two-year-old Lili around the pool area. It … Continue reading →