With the completion of the 1940s in my biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, I’m taking a step back and editing the book so far. The thing that I keep reflecting on is how big it is. I’ve been working on this in separate files, so it hasn’t seemed like more than a few pages at [...]

Wow, I’m already back in school this year. It’s a new year for me in many ways. I’m teaching language arts for the first time this year. It’s been a very strange thing to share my process of writing and reading with the class. For the most part, they are excited to have a teacher [...]

I’m back to school this week, and for the first time in my professional career, I’m teaching English. This should be an interesting experiment as I’m waist deep in editing and writing the biography and I’ll be teaching what I’m doing in the evenings. So it should lead to many interesting discussions.
The book is [...]

As I get further along in the biography, I knew I would get the opportunity to interview more people, since it’s a better bet than some people Gardner knew from the 1960s are more likely to be around than people he knew in the 1920s! And so it is. I’ve been conducting a number of [...]

10 days until we start a new school year. It’s always one of the hardest times of the year for me. After 9 weeks of not wearing shoes, not talking much and sitting more than standing, all of that is reversed.
So of course, as with all good writers, I’ve put everything off until the [...]

Today is the 121st birthday of Erle Stanley Gardner, the author who created the Perry Mason series, the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam series, and the DA series, along with 600+ short stories and various articles and non-fiction works on nature, the desert and Baja. In his 80 years, Gardner did more, wrote more, and [...]

I got my AARP card in the mail yesterday. I refused to open it for a while and finally gave in. I’m not relishing being 50 at all this year. I don’t feel 40, much less 50, and so it’s hard to see this milestone looming ahead of me. After my recent stay in Texas [...]

I just flew in from Austin this week (to reference the old punchline as title), and I had a great time at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas - Austin working on the biography. Of the 600+ boxes, I went through 45 of the most promising boxes in terms of content and [...]

I leave on Sunday for 9 days of research at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin. This is for my biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who created Perry Mason among many other characters. All 600+ boxes of papers have been donated to the library and I’ll be sorting through some of them while [...]

Well, this week has seen me playing Florence Nightingale to Penny, who was spayed this week. It was a hard decision to make. I find that with each dog, I go through a period where I think about breeding them and having more puppies around, but eventually the reality sets in that puppies are a [...]