History Isn’t Carved In Stone (Even When It Is) Drop a rock in water and ripples will emanate outward from the point of entry. Skip a rock across the water and ripples will appear at each point of impact. Time is an ever-flowing river, winding its way from the beginning of time until time is no more. Once a moment passes, it becomes a part of history—eternal, unchangeable, history. Because of this, “what if” becomes one of the most magical…
Chemistry Department Short Stories “I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in…
Fortunate Moments Of Arduous Contrivance “The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would…
Time Management Without A Magical Device On June 13, 1980, and interesting little movie called The Girl, The Gold Watch, And Everything debuted. It was based on a book of the same name by John D. MacDonald. The basic plot is a man (Robert Hays) inherits a watch from his uncle. The girl (Pam Dawber) enters his life around the same time and they begin to fall in love. To make things interesting, a gang of criminals keeps trying to…
Wading Out To The Middle Of The Creek I was never a tall child growing up. The coordination necessary for sports was not something I had in abundance, so reading, writing, and drawing kept me busy. Despite that, I loved the outdoors (even if my required sunblock would have kept a vampire alive.) One of my favorite activities—not that I got to do it often—was wading in creeks and catching crawdads. I was 13—maybe 14—years old when ours and another…
Writing Myself into a Corner Agatha Christie. Her name is synonymous with the mystery novel. Mention Louis L’Amour and westerns spring to mind. If I name a specific author—unless you are true devotee of that author—you will probably associate that person with a specific genre. But did you know that Agatha Christie wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott? Louis L’Amour also wrote boxing stories, action adventure stories set in the South Pacific, and historical fiction that had nothing…