So I've been using ping.fm to update all my social networks.

Unfortunately, I didn't read the manual... So all the stuff I intended for twitter and Facebook also ended up on my blogs. I should go back and fix that sometime (but not tonight).

I also realized that I was losing the connection with other folks, because while I would get responses to my posts, I wasn't commenting ... Continue reading »

I couldn't help but be glad that Jaime Ford's Japanese Keiko and Chinese Henry fail to find married love in the 1940s.

As a half-white child of the 1960s (back when such things were illegal in many states), I recall the hatred and torment I received from my peers (though my peers never physically beat me). The pain a Chinese-Japanese child would have endured during the 1940s is mind ... Continue reading »

The local ladies book club had assigned Kate Atkinson's "Case Histories: A Novel." And I gamely volunteered to lead the discussion.

Alas. We are a group of Mormon ladies. And Kate Atkinson's engaging tale involved quite a bit of sordid gore and guilty sex.

So I suggested a last minute selection switch, recommending Jamie Ford's bestselling "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet."

"Hotel" is the ... Continue reading »

On land again after 10 days at sea (without internet or e-mail - horrors). I did get a lot of reading and writing done. Coincidence, surely.

So I'm in this hotel in a foreign country with a spotlight over the bed that looks like a camera. Laser pointer assuaged my fears, but dude-