Writing

I hadn’t paid any attention to it until very recently–until right after I signed a contract making me “officially” a novelist–but there’s a footnote in my dad’s autobiography/memoir (for family only) that explains the source of his given name: Harold Wright. By extension, since I was named after Dad (yes, I’m a “Junior”), you can…

My wife is looking over my shoulder. “What’s that you’re working on?” she asks. “It’s a manuscript I completed a few years ago, THE KOLTSOVO LEGACY.” “Oh, is that the bloody one?” I nod. I guess relative to EYEWALL, it is. But it concerns me that her tone is pejorative. Apparently it’s okay with her…

My brother, who is in the construction profession in Oregon, has a principle that he applies to all of his business dealings. He calls it the “Paper Bag Principle.” Simply stated, the PBP is this: a deal isn’t done until you have the money in a paper bag, metaphorically speaking, and are walking away with…

Having grown up in the land of big timber, the Pacific Northwest, I’m not easily awed by trees. In Georgia, pines soar to great heights, oaks are sturdy, and magnolias, well, magnificent. But they don’t quite match up to the old-growth Douglas fir and Sitka spruce that adorn the coastal mountains of my Fatherland. Well,…

On days when I grow tired of tilting at windmills (trying to find a literary agent)–i.e., everyday–I paw through the debris in my office in search of one of the many inspirational quotes I’ve left semi-buried for quick resurrection. Unfortunately, while I’m good at the burial part, I’m not very good at the unearthing part.…

It’s been a nasty winter for much of the eastern U.S. No reason for it to end now. And this time it looks as though parts of the Southeast will get their turn in the barrel as an early March snowstorm comes roaring in (see picture above). For what it’s worth (and remember, you get…

In my blog last week I talked about why there is typically so much uncertainty in extended-range weather forecasting. It’s ironic then that currently there is an unusual amount of agreement among the tools (models) used for peering over the meteorological horizon. In fact, The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, for its outlook covering…