Halloween means different things at different times. This year, as New York City emerges from its Covid cocoon, it means a return to normalcy. The Greenwich Village Parade is ON! Last year, the huge explosion of silly fun, clever costumes, and intense crowds that flow onto side streets all over the general area that includes SoHo, NoHo, the East Village, The West Village, Union Square, Chelsea, and Flatiron districts was reduced to a “rerun” of the 2019 parade, via a video presentation on a local cable TV station. It felt sad. And Halloween should never be sad. For some people
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Very early this morning I finished reading an excellent mystery by Val McDermid. She’s a great storyteller! I read it with gusto after having slogged through another British mystery by an author who shall remain nameless here. Let’s just say his series is heavily promoted on Amazon and I got sucked in by the book’s location, Whitby. As a diehard Dracula fan, I couldn’t resist it in the run-up to Halloween.          Comparing the two books is unfair. But the exercise of identifying some of those differences was fun. McDermid’s intricate plot rolled seamlessly out of a cast of multi-dimensional
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Now that I’m finally in the last stage of the big home renovation project—the project that (with the help of the pandemic) upended my life for over three years—I’m wondering what I’ve learned from all of this. I know it’s changed me, but how will it change my fiction? I decided to sit down and make a list the lessons learned during this process. I sincerely hope that some of the better ones will stick with me and, perhaps, improve my storytelling.          One, when people say “things just work themselves out” what they mean is that YOU get that
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