April 20 (4/20) is weed day. The day got its name in the 1970s in California when a group of high school students met after school around 4:20 to get high and 4/20 became a code phrase they could use in front of their parents. Clever stoner types, these high school kids. The reputation of 4/20 spread from there. 420 Magazine, founded in 1993, has a mission around creating cannabis awareness. I...
My next novel, IN FLIGHT, is about a business executive and family man who attempts to put his life back together after surviving a plane crash but also having suffered a trauma-induced dissociative mental state. It will be published this spring (and I’ll be sure to incessantly remind you). If you haven’t read the first chapter about Robert yet, click right here. The story details his marriage...
It’s nearing the tenth anniversary of my father’s death, and I keep thinking about something that happened in the last year of his life. I was involved, and I’ll never know if I did the right thing. At that time, Bob had been diagnosed but was still capable of living independently. My sister and I both lived in town and were keeping a close watch on him, checking in every day, knowing at some...
There are six of us. We’re three couples, all good friends. When we get together there is always a signature cocktail for the evening. It’s my turn to play bartender tonight and the choice is easy: the Vesper. It’s a variation on the martini with a three-to-one gin to vodka ratio, a half measure of Lillet blanc, a dash of bitters, and a lemon peel garnish. Shaken not stirred, the way James Bond...
I’ve been getting some enthusiastic feedback about “The Culling,” my dystopian thriller about a woman on the run from an unjust death sentence and the mercenary assigned to hunt her. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, here’s the link. Below is a brief scene from the novel. It takes place just after Maren meets her neighbor Ven at a small party and he offers...
1 “Yes, I was in Santa Cruz for the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It happened at exactly 5:04 in the afternoon which I knew because that was the time when all the clocks stopped when the power cut out. I had just gotten home and was in my kitchen when the rumbling started and then the whole house was shaking and the noise was like a subway car was passing through. Absolutely deafening. Cabinets...
I got a call from my sister who said my father was in the hospital. He’s a long-time widower who lives alone a few towns away from where we do and he’d done something that can only be considered ill-conceived and a major error in judgment. This happened during the big storm that passed through the other evening, the one that brought gale winds and torrential rains. My father had planned to cook...
There are six of us. We are three couples and all close friends. We live in the same town. We get together often to socialize and to celebrate birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, etc. We take turns hosting. Two of us are on second marriages. One of us is unemployed and battling a sense of worthlessness. One of us is having an affair that two others of us know about. It’s not the same one of us...
I thought I had shut my Ask Dave website down after receiving a number of complaints about the advice I’d given to a fellow who was trying to stay clean and after being investigated by authorities who rudely accused me of making up stuff about someone who closely resembled former New York State Governor Mario Cuomo. But apparently the site is still live and I recently got this letter: Dear...
I caught her reading my journal. I got home and she was already at my place, which is within our rules. When one of us is late the other knows where the key is hidden. Make yourself comfortable. That means open the refrigerator, check out my bookcases, pet my cat. It never means read my journal. I’d left it on my desk. Cover closed, but plain as day. It’s the journal where I write my private...
Close to 7:30, Valentine’s Day, the restaurant full. “Remember, when Vic and Simone get here, act like you don’t know anything,” Kyle said. “I will,” Anna said. “I told you I will.” Anna wasn’t good at hiding her excitement. Her emotions played on her face like a movie on the big screen. She often looked like someone on the verge of bursting into song, although she never fully did. “When they...
The world is coated with ice outside my window and it makes me think of an ice storm that served as a literary device in my novel, CLEAN BREAK (thank you, Harriet). I call it a literary device because it’s one of those writer’s tools I’m using to move my characters around into the right locations for the critical subsequent scenes. Plus it casts a chilly, foreboding atmosphere...
Alize slipped into a crevice between two boulders and shimmied to the top of the taller one. She sat cross-legged on her perch, raised her binoculars, and glassed the length of the pipeline, from north to south and back north again, then adjusted her viewing angle and scanned the western exposure beyond the pipeline into the dry, beige distance: washed-out rock and baked earth and sagebrush, long...
They told their son he could become anything he wanted, and when he wanted to become a poet, they held their tongues and supported his dream. But now he was 27 years old, chronically underemployed, and didn’t seem to produce much work. Every three weeks or so the son would read to his parents a poem he wrote, and frankly, they usually didn’t understand it. The poems might have been lyrical, but...
It started with brushing my teeth left-handed. At first, my movements were clumsy, and I feared I wasn’t getting off all the tartar, and the dentist would reprimand me on my next visit. Also, I discovered when I employed my left arm, my dominant right just hung there like a drooping, effete claw. Accustomed to carrying all the workload, my right didn’t know what the hell was going on. With...
