Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,173 entries, all of them here in full.
May 9, 2024 · 202 words
New Wheels
So after seven years with a Subaru WRX, I’ve gone and bought a new WRX. Upgunned with a 2.2-liter boxer engine that wouldn’t be complete without a ginormous turbocharger sitting on it. My old car was in good shape, and a used WRX is always in demand, so I got a very nice price for […]
Read entry →April 27, 2024 · 130 words
Pig and Veg
We’re in a campaign to empty out the chest freezer, which contains a lot of stuff that I don’t remember buying, and the result for tonight was this pork loin roast cooked with potatoes, carrots, and onions. You could think of it as a one-pot meal if it weren’t for the fact that it’s in […]
Read entry →April 23, 2024 · 624 words
One Way to Get to Pylos
Another picture from my 1980 trip. I’ve fled the freezing rain of Northern Europe for the Med, and here we find me on a rare sunny day. Greece turned out to be cold and rainy as hell, and one night I pitched my tent in a tree-sheltered hollow, only to have the rain start to […]
Read entry →April 19, 2024 · 359 words
The Small Rains Down Do Rain
Here I am in the UK in the autumn of 1980. I’m in Greenwich doing research for the Privateer books, and I’m standing in front of the clipper ship Cutty Sark. I seem to be an older and more weathered person than I remember. I seem to attract extreme weather whenever I visit Britain, and […]
Read entry →April 16, 2024 · 582 words
Maculate
“Damn.” Now that’s a word you don’t want to hear from your eye doc when he’s peering through his scope at the interior of your eye. And you really don’t want to hear his next line, which is: “You really can’t catch a break, can you?” The vision in my left eye has been deteriorating […]
Read entry →April 8, 2024 · 75 words
Down the Gullet
This is the best picture I got of 2024’s solar eclipse, taken by focusing the camera directly into the eyepiece of Kathy’s Astroscan telescope. What followed was disappointing, because the actual eclipse was clouded out. Totality nevertheless remained impressive, as the moon’s shadow descended with amazing speed. If I
Read entry →April 4, 2024 · 235 words
Mss.
I haven’t been visible much online because I’ve been buried up to my eye sockets in submissions for Taos Toolbox. Because of the weeks of radiation and other treatments last year, I was late in getting notices out, and as late as a couple weeks ago I was wondering if we’d get enough applications to […]
Read entry →March 21, 2024 · 351 words
Not Saving
So the other night something weird happened with Scrivener, my word processor. I finished my work, backed it up to Dropbox, and went about the rest of my evening. Next night, I opened Scrivener, and discovered that none of the new writing I’d done the previous night was anywhere in the file. I checked the […]
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