So it goes...

I am as lame as they come when it comes to changing up my Saturday routine. I have come to love sameness and ritual on weekends, so when a curveball comes, I tend to grumble about it for a few weeks before it even happens. Typically my Saturdays are completely predictable. Coffee with my wife, home to walk the dog, vacuum the whole house, go to library and write for a couple hours, do more house chores, have dinner or go out to eat, go to bed. Simple, boring and something I've come to love. Last weekend it was all messed up by an all-day golf event. Yesterday all of that routine was blown out of the water by an all-day writing conference I attended in Middleton, just outside of Madison. I was invited to the conference because I served as a judge in one of its contests. Of course, I was flattered, and it was fairly close to where I live, so I agreed. Very much like the golf tournament the week before and true to what almost always happens, my change in routine was stimul...

As I mentioned in the last post we are in the dog days of winter. It's not March yet, but it's sure not January either. Thank goodness for that. Maybe it's just me, but these long winter nights are causing me to shift things around a bit. I'm a man of routine, but sometimes I get sick of the sameness and shake things up with some change. I think I got all of the winter hate out of me last post, so here are a few things I've found that have helped me through this winter season. I've gone back to writing in longhand and it's bringing forth good things. Thinking back to many of my first days of writing Dirty Shirt , I wrote most of my stories in a notebook and then transcribed them to the computer later. That fell away to where I was doing it all on my laptop. Well, in a fit of staring at a blank screen with nary a thought in my head for too long one night, I thought I needed a change. I picked up my pen and started scrawling words and before I knew it the ...