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Hello Friends. I hope you are doing well. This is going to zig before it zags. Buckle up and hold on. When I was seven, going on eight, two deranged people, one in December of 1980 and another in March of 1981, did some deranged things, and somehow The Catcher in the Rye was "blamed" for the actions of those unwell men. I’m not going to use their names here. I don’t want to give them more space in the world. If you know, you know. If you want to look it up. You can.  The poin

Hello Friends,  How is your January? Cold? Blustery? Feeling rudderless? I hope not. How are your New Year’s Resolutions? Holding firm? I sure hope so. I’m not a big resolution person, but I do like to set and meet goals. As part of my social media interactions, I do a fun book bingo project each quarter. When I first started, it was just random ideas like “book for middle-readers” or “female narrator.” Eventually, Lea and I started making themes (she also does all the amazin

Hello Friends.  I hope you are doing well. As the year ends, we all have a tendency to get wistful. I get it. Things end and begin, and we reflect. I totally understand this idea, but keep in mind that calendars are a construct. Not only is it not the end of 2025 on the Hebrew and Chinese calendars, but they have totally different New Year’s days. So, really, maybe instead of being contemplative just at the end of the year, I would like to advocate for doing some deep thinkin

Hello Friends. I was traveling for work last week, and I had the opportunity to go see a colleague’s mixed media art installation. He used pencils, crayons, paint, paper, and scraps of old paper palettes. Alone, any one of the works of art would have been interesting, but hung in a series, they were different. Seeing them the way he wanted us to see them, in that room, in that order, made a difference to me. Something in him had him make this art and hang it that way, in that

Hello Friends, As you may know by now, Universal Truth is out in the universe now. I am so proud of this book, of this series, of the whole thing. I am now officially halfway through the series. Well, I’m halfway through the fifth book in the series, but the world has the first three. It is really like an out-of-body experience every day. With The Austen Chronicles, I’ve done my best to write a love letter to Jane Austen, while creating my own stories. If I didn’t think I wa

Hello Friends.  Forgive me if I’ve told this story before, but it is sort of worth telling again. When I told Lea that I had been...

Hello Friends, In my younger, and more vulnerable years, I was given a book that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Like most...

Hello Friends, The late, great, Floridian poet said, “ The waiting is the hardest part .” For real, Mr. Petty. I feel you, sir. Waiting...

Happy Summer Solstice, friends. Where I live, it has been summer for a while, so the “first day of summer” is just a day on the calendar....

Hello Friends,  My day job, as a Dean, consists of finding ways to grow my program while putting out fires in the day-to-day running of...

Hello friends,   Can you believe it's April? It seems like it should be October by now, doesn’t it? I think part of my problem with the...

Hello friends. While I write this, spring has not yet sprung, we are still a few days away from making it official, but it is March and...

Greetings from Snowy Michigan. I’ve capitalized the S in snowy as I firmly believe Snowy Michigan is a real, solid place and thus worthy...

Hello friends. Happy New Year to you. I hope you have found a way to focus on something good. As I said last year, in my January essay, I...

Hello Friends.   As we reach the final chapter of 2024, and as I close in on the final chapter of Jane, the fourth book of The Austen...

Hello friends. How are you? Doing alright? Hang in there.    There is a moment at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian  that is equal...

Hello friends, while I know it is spooky season, I don’t feel particularly interested in spending time thinking about frightening things...

Hello Friends. Happy September. I realize I start a lot of these newsletters with “When I was a kid…” I am about to do it again. I am...

Hello friends,    When I was a kid (relax, this isn’t going to be a back-in-my-day rant), school started after Labor Day and it ended...

Hello Friends,    Before I sit down to write the next book in my series, I revisit the source material. Sure, I’ve read all of Jane...