FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS—Francine Raften will take you on a witty ride. Enough about literature and life, today we just talk life! I want to tip my hat to Francine Raften who hosts “TELL ME ABOUT IT,” a talk show with a buzz on www.Earth2World.com. It’s so good, it should make

DEATH THOU SHALT DIE*   I am aware there are a number of books written about the death penalty which have raised questions about whether or not justice is served when the state takes a life. One of the earliest writings to foment debate in my memory was not a book, but the letters o

ON A “NEED TO KNOW” BASIS Gossip plays a major role in much of literature. We find it in Dickens, Thackery, Tolstoy and Edith Wharton, Henry James… in fact, few novels exist without it and even fewer biographies. Let’s face it, we humans are curious about each other.  (www.12

THE ROSE AND THE TEMPLE I wrote on Friday, that a person feeling out of tune with life should consider which world was the source of disappointment. Did it lay with the natural world or with the societies we build? My guess, and not a very bold one, is that our discontent lies with t

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE I recently read an article about Maurice Sendak, author of numerous children’s’ books, the most famous of them being Where the Wild Things Are. At 83 he lives alone in Connecticut and walks with a cane which he says he uses “for hitting people” (The

THE FEMININE ASPECT A friend recently put a new author’s work in my hand… that is to say new to me though the writer, C. L. Moore was born in 1911 and died a victim of Alzheimer’s in 1987.  C.L. stands for Catherine Lucille and she was the first American woman to write in the s

TO PUBLISH OR PERISH, THAT IS THE QUESTION I confess I am on the cusp of a question: whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of working with Independent publishers or to take arms against them and become an entrepreneur of my work. It’s a question that som

THE ALLEGORY OF LIFE I’ve written an allegory that’s been rejected by a number of periodicals. Still, I persist in sending it out because I have such faith in the piece. The other day I received another rejection from a newly established publication. This one included comments f

SINNER, KNOW THYSELF More than once I have written blog posts in praise of complex sentences. By combining several ideas between a capital and a period, a writer creates relationships among thoughts that wouldn’t be as successful if each was confined to its own subject and verb. Co

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN…I CAN’T HELP IT* In the November issue of “Vanity Fair” Robert Loomis, a recently retired book editor with Random House, tells a story about the author Jackie Collins. When asked why she became a writer she retorted the reason was because her husband gav