I shared a few thoughts on accountability and fiction on Crime Reads.

A shared some thoughts about how to get the most out of rotating point of view in this Writer’s Digest article.

Only 20% of fiction is bought by men. I made the radical argument that fiction is useful and shared a few recommendations in The Daily Beast.

When my wife and I quit our jobs and fled the country, we brought our rubber chicken. It started as part of a Halloween costume, but it had become a mascot of sorts, surfacing at parties and bars and weddings. It travelled with our friends to different cities and returned with pictures of its exploits. You can drink beer out of the chicken, and it becomes a limbo bar if you stretch it, and when we offered a $100 bounty to anyone who could fit it in their mouth, lines formed. It was like a garden gnome, but lighter, more useful, and easier to pack. By the time we left the country, the question wasn’t why would you bring a rubber chicken? but rather, how could you not?

We sailed the boat to the yard for the winter today. The wind was blowing hard from the southwest, so the trip was fast, the ride a little rough. I never paid much attention to the wind before we got the sailboat, but now I think about it all summer. I often check the app that tells me the wind’s direction and strength, so that I can decide whether to text friends and make the drive to the lake. But once I get out on the water, I just feel the wind on my face, watch the telltales, and feel the boat tilt beneath me when a gust hits. You can’t see that gust coming, just the ripples on the water as it races toward you.

I’m not sure where my stories come from…

How do you know when it’s time to take your autistic, bipolar twelve-year-old daughter to the psych ward? (They call them “behavioral units” now.) Is it when you find yourself sitting on her back and holding her arms to the ground while your wife lies on her legs? When she head-butts you the first time? The fifth? When she spits in your face? When she tears her bed frame apart and goes after you with one of the spindles? When she bites you? When she breaks the door, the cabinet, the walls? When she says she wants to kill you? When she does all these things ten times, twenty times, forty times in four weeks? The truth is that you don’t know. You really don’t.