The piano was one of my first loves. When I was three, I wrote my first song on it: “All My Bombs.” I grew up in the Cold War-era, Russia still an existential threat. But in those keys of the old player piano, there was magic. I loved to slide open the horizontal drawers and watch the hammers hit the strings as I plunked notes.
Running with my Son
When I think back to the activities my dad and I shared, I remember playing catch with the baseball in the front yard after dinner. I remember biking to the baseball field by the elementary school playground, and my dad hitting grounders and flyballs to me. After a while, it was my turn for batting practice. Those were glorious evenings in the spring and summer.
Measuring Time & Other Stories
As 2019 began, I received exciting news: Wiseblood Books, a wonderful small press, will be publishing my first short-story collection, Measuring Time & Other Stories. The publication of this collection in the fall is something I’ve been looking forward to for years. The writing life is a long, slow journey, and this book is proof of that fact.
My Top 10 Books of 2018
I read all good books this year. Well, I did start one that I didn’t finish, and you can read about that experience in an earlier post. That wasn’t a good book. But of all the books I finished, all were good. As a result, it was difficult to pick out my ten favorites, but here they are.
Disclaimer: only one of these books was published in 2018. Only 3 of the books that I read this year were published in 2018.
Writing the Second Draft
In the month since I finished a draft of a new story, I’ve been working intermittently on the second draft of a different short story. And as is typical of my writing process, I wrote the first draft four years ago. (It’s not uncommon for me to write drafts of stories at least a year apart.)
