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  • A Remarkable Review by Mayra Calvani

    Mayra Calvani did an incisive interview with me some months back.  She also reviewed Down to a Sunless Sea quite favorably. Her site is darkphantom.com and she now freelances at Today.com. A novelist and reviewer, she is the recent author of a book on reviewing on blogs. I asked if she might review The i Tetralogy, cautioning her as I often do with reviewers about the graphic and very disturbing aspects of the book, telling her to read the autobiographical essay at the end so as to determine my writerly aims and intentions. In private correspondence she recently shared how…

  • Personal Posturings: Yahoos as Bloggers

    Before I begin this howl, I’ll define Yahoo as a lout, brute and coarse human being, the term itself derived from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. I vaguely recall reading this fabulous book in the early years of college, thinking it was written for kids. Was I wrong! For the past year I tried to market my book by going to “literary” blogs, reading up a little on the blogger, scanning some of the books read in order to get a sense of the blogspot as a reasonable market for my book. I have seen hundreds of blogs, having sent my book…

  • Free Associations

    I have no particular theme to write about. I have no jawbone of an ass as Samson had to fight off the Philistines. A series of mental quarks come to mind and why fight them off. I saw Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” last evening surrounded by a gray-haired audience, including me, who laughed at all the one-liners in the script, often throwaway lines. I felt as if I was on the conveyor belt of soylent green, except the person next to me was a living cracker. Clintwood is an icon, I suppose, and his performance here was good. His direction is precise and…

  • I Am With Child And Worry About Its Health

    Sojourner is the present manuscript I am enmeshed with, and it is not going well because I have lost faith in it. The second half of the book moves quickly, the first half seems too slow paced, although I have cut here and there. I lack the editing skills to reformulate, to shift chapters here or there, or to delete them entirely. I have let the book “rest” and when I picked it up again, it still did not move itself. Perhaps it is a book I should no longer work on and give it up.  When I wrote this…