We are up in Ojai and watching with great interest the progress of Hurricane Hilary as she makes her way up the coast of Baja. Our son-in-law Gregorio has family in Cabo, Ensenada, and Tijuana, Mexico so the weather there is important to us. As far as Southern CA goes, the hurricane is supposed to…

When I was little, I was a Mama’s baby; I mean, a BIG Mama’s baby. At night, I sneaked into her bed to snuggle; in the daytime, I played near her while she read, typed, or worked on bills. By age five, I didn’t mind playing in another room or outside in the backyard as long…

When I saw on Facebook this past Wednesday that my childhood friend, Randy McBroom, had suffered a massive heart attack and wasn’t expected to live, I immediately burst into tears. How could that be? He had just posted a few days before that he was on the mend after suffering some serious but under-control health…

Ray and I went outside a few minutes ago (10:35 pm) and saw two impressive meteors shooting through the western sky within minutes of each other. Tonight is the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower with around 100 shooting stars an hour, and the shower goes well into the early morning hours. According to the…

This article is one I’ll be using for the “Scene Craft” online course I’ll be teaching in the fall for Story Circle Network. This is filled with valuable information. For you writers – or potential writers – out there, this is very helpful.  Len 10 Tips on Writing Strong Scenes by Jordan E. Rosenfeld Any…

One early evening in summer, my older brother George and I headed off to the Little League baseball field where he was going to play a game and I was going to watch. He was eleven and I was eight. I was barefooted and wore shorts and a thin top; he had on his baseball…

I was twelve years old when I scanned through the beautifully bound books that comprised our family library. I don’t know why I decided on that particular day to look through these volumes. Perhaps it was cold outside and the idea of curling up with a book in a cozy room was alluring. Whatever the…

When I was growing up, I had a problem buying shoes. My feet were small and wide, and in my little Texas town of 7,000, it was not always easy finding shoes that fit me in the local shoe stores. This meant at the very least traveling 25 miles over to Sherman, which had a…

This is a rewrite of a first-draft flash fiction piece I shared here on my blog a couple of weeks back. I pared that piece down and killed a few darlings along the way. I was motivated to rewrite when a member of my critique group said, “I think you have something here, but please…