Category: Commentary

  • Fires In The Catalinas

    The fires in the Catalinas are better contained now, no new flareups that I can see. Smoke channels upwards here and there, but not the darkened clouds of a week or so ago. Containment, then break-out, then containment again. People began to be disappointed in the language chosen to convey…

  • Query Letter for Sojourner: “To Be What We Are, And To Become What We Are Capable Of Becoming Is The Only End Of Life.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

    I’ve decided to blog this query written on 19 August 1990. Of course, I will change the credits and tinker here and there; however, other than squeezing it tighter, I like it. Having just completed a major revision of the book, cutting about 12 pages and revising sentence by sentence,…

  • Catching Up With Mt. Lemmon

    I’m at poolside now, late into dusk. In the distance an immense cloud is above the Catalinas. It’s as if a big fist gave a shiner to the sky. A covey of birds, new to me, strut linearly about the pool, mother and chicks. Offbeat bird sounds punctuate the lambent…

  • Making Sense — The Writer’s Task And His ultimate Folly

    I have been away from blogging because I am now deeply into rewriting, rather editing, Sojourner, my historical fiction about a Chinese who ventures to California during the Gold Rush. It is a philosophical quest that he is on.  I wrote it about the age of 40, while teaching in…