Month: March 2022

  • KOP: Beatrice and Tony

    Scott was about to slip away from the circle, having determined the conversation to be nothing but the usual boring stuff that adults find endlessly fascinating, when Tony joined the group next to Beatrice. He was all scrubbed and groomed, smelled like he had collided with an aftershave truck, and gazed at Beatrice like a…

  • KOP: Troll, T-Bone, and Gizmo

    Holly stood in Scott’s doorway at the top of the stairs. “There are three boys waiting for you on the front porch, a nerdy one, a chubby one, and a jock. They need a dorky one to complete the set and heard about you.” Mom entered right behind her. “These must be the boys Beatrice…

  • Sweeney and KIND OF PLAID

    The interaction with Sweeney in the Dalriada woods is at Scott’s initiation. The idea of some mysterious Irish performance artist (whatever that is) living in the woods proves to be too much for him to resist. His suburban neighborhood near Indianapolis definitely didn’t have one of those. Scott reaches out to Sweeney just to see…

  • Why “Plaid?” Why “Kind of…?” Why Y2K?

    The works of Christian fiction that I hold in high regard take me on a deeply personal journey and show the hero’s dilemma as though it were my own. We can identify with artfully crafted characters confronting sin, what sin does to all of us and the world. Sin need not be spectacular to be…

  • KIND OF PLAID. What were you thinking?

    My unpublished novel, KIND OF PLAID, began as a series of “what if?” reveries I experienced riding the commuter train to and from work in Boston. I’d walk down our little tree lined block and continue down Common Street through town center to reach the platform before 6:00 a.m. and wait for the train with…

  • Outside my front door

    Outside my front door is a small town in a Midwestern county where about ninety-eight percent of the land is used for farming. Well, not right outside my door. Across the road is a plowed field that was in corn last year and will be in soy beans this year. The small town is about…

  • Outside my back door

    Our back yard is the Tippecanoe River. We don’t actually own it but we can borrow it any time we like. There are two dams on the Tippy as it flows through our town, and we live on Lake Freeman, formed by the lower dam which was completed in 1925. It’s not a majestic body…

  • You’d think this would be easy

    I’ve easily blown past the ten thousand hour rule for self-improvement. Many times. If I have developed any particular skill it’s got to be in the messy business of starting something new. I’ve gone through the start-up phase of so many careers, projects, commitments, and adventures you’d think I’d be good at it. It’s not…