The Universe Is An A**Hole That Can Hear You

Year-2012-in-Space-30+-Outstanding-Photographs_06-@-GenCept  Anyone who has secretly yearned for something in life is probably familiar with the feeling I’m about to describe. It’s a feeling that is particularly common among frustrated artists who slave away at work that is Other Than. It’s the feeling–no, I take that back, it’s the FEAR–that the universe might eavesdrop on your private whisperings and actually DO SOMETHING about it.

And nobody wants that. Not me, that’s for damn sure! Not unless I get to decide the What, When, Where, How–and ONLY IF it comes with a generous plan for health and dental. I want easy change. Pleasant change. Change that doesn’t frighten me and make my bowels transform lunch into liquid lava. Continue reading

Bridge Trolls and Other Writers

We’re as ubiquitous to the profession as a Weenie Bite Competition is to a Biker Rally: Non-writing writers. The corpses of our stillborn ideas and best intentions lay dying a slow death in computer file folders across the land. They languish, starved and forgotten in the yellowed pages of countless notebooks. They haunt the collective creative consciousness of us all; not quite dead, but not among the living either. We are the slobbering, warty bridge trolls who live in self-imposed exile beneath the literary highway overpass; a highway traveled by those far better than us. And by far better, I don’t mean smarter or more gifted or  funnier or more educated or  better looking (though don’t rule it out); Continue reading