My brother Michael’s first book, The Abiding Companion, is now available on Amazon.com, with a Kindle version coming shortly. The Abiding Companion is like a devotional guide, featuring one short essay for each chapter of the New Testament...
My elderly mother has fallen, and she can't get up. Her spine is fractured in two places. We are on the starting end of what promises to be a painful eight weeks of recovery. I'm writing this during my third overnight hospital shift in...
We are in Oxford, Alabama, standing in line at the Wendy’s. In front of us: three young men, ages eleven, twelve, and thirteen. The youngest and the oldest are, except for their age, virtually identical: disheveled brown hair, camouflage...
So, I have all these ideas for books. And for ages and ages and ages, I’ve tortured myself with this question: which book should I write first? It’s a tough decision. I mean, there’s Family Thais, a novel I’ve already drafted...
Friend J.C. (not the Messiah) spotted this out-of-place condiment in a local car dealer’s restroom. Don’t want to think too much about how or why a bottle of A1 got to the men’s room, but I agree with J.C. that the killer detail is...
During the two days we spent in Rome prior to our cruise, Clyde wasn’t feeling well enough to get out and about. I stayed with him in the hotel room most of the time — but at one point, after making sure he had everything he needed, I...
We live in a precarious balance between truly caring about our [art] and not caring about anything, between feeling real desire and feeling empty and dull, between trusting our abilities and not trusting them at all. -- Eric Maisel, from "Creativity...
I downloaded a great new app for my iPad called Priority Matrix, which allows you to create lists divided into four customizable panes, or quadrants. What's a Priority Matrix? A classical priority matrix takes two qualities -- like Urgency and...
Early in my career as an information artist, I was asked to collaborate with others on the rapid creation and deployment of a promotional video. Project leaders identified a large number of stakeholders and experts, informed us about the purpose of...
