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 try to sell you a car, some medicine, a resort destination, or a political candidate. If you have two hours to spare and spend it all reading, it will literally be two hours of pure, solid reading—not one-third annoying pitch blather.

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 of Florida altogether and to someplace much colder—usually back to New York, whence I came to the Sunshine State in 1984. I wake up with a heavy heart.

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 1992, when I made the sale).

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 in progress whenever a school bus stops and flashes its red lights, once again having my progress impeded by heavy traffic when driving past either of the two schools up the road at arrival or dismissal time. But it also means a new set of...

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 S.O. moving in with us, and we have to make room for his or her books, so some of ours have, however regrettably, got to go. It may be that an adult child is moving back in and needs the space.

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 from the library. “Rubbish!” say I.

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 fortunate few who really love their work.)

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 company that went under, and the book is now out of print, and the other, my first cookbook to be published, is still in print—literal print, not an e-book—with another publisher.) I want to talk this week about cooking and writing, and how they overlap....

“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 weekends, or by committing two hours every evening to sweating out that book when they’re really too exhausted from a day of tiring and non-gratifying work, or when they’d really rather be spending time with their families and/or friends.