So it goes...

Just time for a few short thoughts before I head out to see my friend Nick Konkle  play an acoustic set down at Bernies Tap Room in downtown Waukesha. Nick is a talented, rising musician whose live sets get better Flowers " is out and available for download at Band Camp. Check it out. I have had occasional ear worms to some of his songs which usually means their addictively good. every time I see him. He has a couple of CD's out and is building a decent song list of original material. I like to refer to him as like Neil Young without the road eyes and the feedback (of Rust Never Sleeps.) A quick rundown on what's new with Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir : I came across the fact that it is now available at the Milwaukee Public Library. All that was required to get it in there was to ask via an email. This is pretty cool because I consider Milwaukee my second home, even though most of my time in Wisconsin has been spent in Waukesha. I love the city and I cons...

I thought I'd give another writing/Dirty Shirt update because the life of a newly published author is about as fun as it gets, at least so far. I'll touch on some of what has transpired in my endless pursuit of making it to the New York Times Bestseller's list. (Enough from the peanut gallery, there!) Some of the cooler things I've found came when I googled my name and Dirty Shirt as a few keywords. Everyone should try this at some point to see what's out there about you, whether you know it or not. It was in doing this that I found my book was being offered through Omni Lit . Now, I have no idea how they got a hold of it, but near as I can tell, they harvest the data from Amazon and then sell the book. Hopefully I get a cut from it somewhere along the lines, but who knows? I trust they're in cahoots with Amazon and the authors do get some stipend, like a couple dimes. I also came across a mention of the book in the Duluth News Tribune . They gave it a ...

In 2012, my brother Tom and I and a couple boatloads of cousins, including my kids went up to the Boundary Waters. We went up for a 3 night trip and stopped at Piragis Outfitter  to get canoes and a couple of packs. It turned out the outfitters has a bookstore hooked onto their business. While Tom and I negotiated the canoe rentals, our kids wandered through the bookstore. Ben found a book The Zombie Survival Guide on one of the racks and asked if he could buy it. I said sure, knowing that the whole "Zombie  thing" was big among kids his age - and society in general, for that matter. I figured it would be a good campfire filler or might make for some decent entertainment in case the kids got bored at some point. Furthermore, I have a hard time denying any kid a book. Reading is so important in my life that we want to encourage any reading we can. It turns out my suspicions were correct. Ben spent much of the first night reading factoids around the fire about how to surviv...