Excerpt: Dinah lowered the camera. “This tape is almost full, anyway.” Her eyes were bright and excited. “There’s stories all over this place just walking around on two legs. See that girl over there? She quit her job waitressing to pick mushrooms. Said she could make more money. And that guy? He builds log homes.…
So what kind of mail do you think the postman delivers to the Wicked Witch in her cottage in the woods? How about a flyer from Hobgoblin Supplies Ltd., advertising bargain basement prices on a Cup and Sorcerer tea service (it washes itself!) and Big Brooms (for the larger witch, as seen on TV!). Such…
Read more A Cup and Sorcerer tea service (it washes itself!)
THE ICEWORM FESTIVAL IS probably the only place in the world where “You suck!” is regarded as encouragement, not an insult. The place was Cordova, Alaska, it was the first weekend of February, and it was Saturday afternoon at the Powder House, where the annual Oyster Shuck-and-Suck Contest was about to begin. Anybody could compete…
People always ask writers where we get our ideas. Usually I say “the idea fairy” and leave it at that. Ideas come from any and everywhere, something I read or a story I heard or a headline in the media. Once it was my father watching a Cessna on floats taking off from Lake Hood…
The first chapter of the second novel in the Eye of Isis series. 1 The scroll was written in Greek. The hand was neat, the label tied to the scroll easily read. The sixteenth máthima of the twenty-seventh Eye of Isis By her own hand for the record Twelfth Bay, Seventh Shelf The Room of…
Excerpt: “One more thing,” King said. “Can you pass a drug screen?” “I beg your pardon?” “You’ll have to pass a drug screen. And you’ll be required to sign a loyalty oath.” “Am I going to work on the North Slope or am I joining the American Nazi Party?” Childress flushed a dark red. “It’s…
Any good biography is not only a portrait of the subject, it is a doorway that opens into a place and a time, and Flexner’s book is rich with this kind of detail. “The “Wild West” was then on the Atlantic seacoast,” he writes of Virginia in 1675, the year the first Washington came to…
Read more Jefferson now tried to tone the Frenchman down, but it was like arguing with a tornado.
from “Alaska Travel Etiquette” You’ll arrive in Anchorage on a Boeing 737 or some other big generic jet crammed to the bulkheads with fellow passengers, flight attendants cranky because of all the carry-ons and pilots made manifest only by a disembodied voice emanating from the ceiling. If you decide to fly out of Anchorage into…
Read more Before you board you will be asked how much you weigh. Tell the truth!
The second chapter of the first novel in the Eye of Isis series, set in Alexandria in the time of Cleopatra. 2 (Part 2) “What are you working on?” Tetisheri said. The queen watched the pot as it came back to a boil. “Dried powdered willow bark ground fine, pomegranate juice, and honey.” “What’s it…
Excerpt: The pot was seven feet tall and seven feet wide and three feet deep, a steel frame covered in metal netting, 750 pounds of dead weight empty. Kate was five feet tall, weighed just over 120 pounds and was mere flesh and bone, but she had Newton on her side, and she waited. She…
