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…

Here is a photo essay of our recent trip to the county fair. Suffice it to say that food played a major role in this adventure. Lots of people, lots of fun, and well worth the trip! Welcome to the Ventura County Fair This is such a bad photo, it makes me laugh out loud….

We had an impromptu family gathering today with all of our kids and grandkids to commemorate the opening day of a vacation trip for Sarah, Gregorio, and their kids. We met at Ventura Harbor Village, a place I’d never been before, and had a little lunch and a quick trip down to the beach. It…

I noticed today in the stats for my blog that my most-read blog post this week was the eulogy I delivered several years ago for my former brother-in-law, Leslie’s husband, Ray Agutter. Often, people search for eulogies when they need to write one themselves, and I suspect this is why the post received more readers…