Year: <span>2016</span>

Aren’t books wonderful? They’re chock-full of entertainment, information, and assistance. Whether you choose to read fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or some of each of these, you can get a lot of pleasure out of books. And you get it all with NO COMMERCIALS! Nobody’s stopping at a crucial point in the storyline or informative explanation to...

There are three recurring dreams I have with some frequency. One is an unhappy dream. The other two always have me waking up feeling good. The unhappy dream involves moving from one house or apartment to another, not because I want to but because I am forced by some circumstance—and often it involves moving out...

Although I’ve had over 100 books published, I was a “late bloomer.” I didn’t have my first book published until 1993, well into my writing-and-editing career. The contract for that book, a book of children’s activities, written for parents, included the provision for a more-than-decent advance (a rarity in 2016 but more easily attained in...

July is almost over, and here in Palm Beach County, although the season is still scorching—and will remain so for some time yet—it’s almost fall for the school system. The local schools open on August 16th. It means once again yielding to street-crossing students up at the corner when I’m driving, once again being halted...

It happens to all of us. It may be that our bookshelves are too crammed and there’s nowhere to put our latest acquisitions. It may be that we’re downsizing, moving to smaller quarters, and we have to divest ourselves of some of our possessions—including books. It may be that we have a new spouse or...

My friend Bess recently wrote a piece about hoarding, in which she advocated ruthless pruning of all one’s possessions…including books. She asked rhetorically if a person is really going to re-read all the books he or she has saved and suggested that, even if you want to revisit a book, you can always borrow it...

I love words. This should come as no surprise, given that I’m a writer. Ever since the group’s inception, I’ve been a member of PUNY (Punsters United Nearly Yearly), an online wordplay group. I love to play with words as much as I love to write and edit them. (And yes, I’m one of those...

If you’re at all familiar with my books, you may be aware that besides two novels, a bunch of nonfiction, and quite a few books for kids, I also have had a large handful of cookbooks published—all but two of them published by Roundtable. (Of those two, one was pubbed as an e-book by a...

“Everyone has a book inside them”—or so goes a widely held belief. But is it true?

I count myself very lucky—or blessed. Well, there are actually a number of reasons that I feel fortunate in life, but the one I have in mind at the moment is professional. Many book-writers have to toil at dayjobs far removed from what they really want to be doing—writing books—and get to write only on...