Year: <span>2016</span>

Although I don’t make New Year’s resolutions myself, I’m aware that many people do. Okay, for all you readers out there who are resolution-makers, I have a suggestion for you: How about resolving to broaden the scope of your reading in 2017?

So there I was, doing something very familiar: reading one of my picturebooks to a classroom full of first-graders enrolled in an after-school program. It being close to Christmas, the book I was reading was suitably seasonal—one I had written, of course, although out of another publishing house, not Roundtable. When I had finished reading...

Still making out your Christmas shopping list? Having trouble deciding what to get some of the people you need to buy presents for? Not surprisingly, as a writer, I advocate giving books. With books, there’s no worrying about guessing wrong at size or, worse, insulting someone by buying a Large for a person who wears...

I’ve been good this year, so I know I’m not on your “naughty” list. We don’t have a chimney, but you can do as our UPS driver does and leave my presents at the front door, then knock loudly so I know to check and see what’s waiting for me.

A writer I admire and enjoy reading the books of, Mary Roach, wrote in her book MY PLANET, “You get crumbs in the bed and steal my blankets. I still want the divorce.” It was a throwaway line in an otherwise-oriented chapter.

Thanksgiving 2016…well, “as near as makes no never mind,” to use an old colloquial expression that, while it isn’t grammatically correct, is very expressive. Thanksgiving 2016. It’s been a turbulent year, but if I don’t get into politics here—and I won’t, I promise—that excludes most of the turbulence and most of what everyone is still...

There is a rooster inside my head that goes off like the most reliable alarm clock at 5 every morning if I’m not already awake—which most often I am. At times in my past I tried staying up later in hopes that would cause me to sleep later. It didn’t. It only left me resembling...

LAKELAND — Ferguson Addison first became aware of Frances Langford through a family connection. Addison, who grew up in Southwest Florida, had a cousin who played piano in the 1920s at WDAE, a radio station in Tampa. Langford, a Lakeland resident, appeared on a weekly show on WDAE, singing in front of a band.

The attendance was very nearly SRO at last Saturday’s third big event of the organization 4 Authors by Authors (read the “4” as “For”). In a jam-packed large room at Keiser University in West Palm Beach, writers and would-be writers sat and absorbed wisdom and inspiration from five speakers: author Lisa McCourt (speaking on behalf...

It comes just once a year—and I’m not talking about Christmas, or the just-passed Halloween. The subject today is NaNoWriMo, and as it just started yesterday, November 1st, you’re really not too late to jump in and catch up.