Coyote Crossing

An excerpt from my forthcoming garden book

With enough distance now from the marriage, the dog, and the last of my gardens, I have been able the last few days to summon the fortitude to sort through old garden writing — much of it previously published in a proto-e-book entitled The

Don’t buy Walking With Zeke from Amazon

[Updated: Well, that was fast. Guess we scared ‘em. Amazon Agrees to Collect State Tax in California]

I just posted the below-quoted as a review on the Amazon page for my book Walking With Zeke. If you have a moment to click through and mark it

Pulp Fiction: A Screenplay By Orson Scott Card

7. INT. APARTMENT BUILDING HALLWAY - MORNING

Elder Enos: Still I must say; play with matches, you get burned.

Elder Jed: Might you clarify that?

Elder Enos: One simply does not wash the feet of Mosias Wallace’s youngest wife.

Elder Jed: Surely

Burning of sorts metaphorical and otherwise

The day before yesterday Annette and I took the Jeep up into the hills, found ourselves a shady spot in a jumble of boulders in Joshua Tree National Park. It was deliciously cool, perhaps as low as 95 degrees, and ash-throated flycatchers raised

KCET and Naming The Joshua Tree part 3

1) Those of you not connected to me on Facebook or Twitter may not have gotten a reminder of late that I have been writing a weekly column at KCET, the Los Angeles public TV station’s website. They show up every Wednesday at 10 AM Los Angeles time,

Self-indulgent linkery

Heh. … (continues)

The economics of self-publishing: anecdata

In March 2008 I self-published Walking with Zeke, an anthology of blog posts and a few other pieces of writing about my late dog.

It has since sold just under 300 copies, if you don’t count the ones I bought. I get a pretty good-sized percentage

Small

A few months ago I was walking back downhill in Runyon Canyon after having reached the top and Mullholland, and I noticed it again. I was cruising along at a reasonable clip, not running but not dawdling, and one person after another meandered into

On Writing For Free

Exposure is what writers die of.

I say that having used exposure as a carrot myself, and fairly often, over the last couple of decades. Working for publications that had no budget to pay writers you generally have no other choice but to wave that

Writing @KCET

Whoops. I mentioned this in a few places this morning, but not here. My writing is going to be featured every Wednesday morning on the website of KCET, Los Angeles’ flagship (though non-PBS) public television station. Here’s the first installment,

30 different ways to say “I’m a big honking jerk” on the Internet

(A non-exhaustive list.)

1. “tl;dr”
2. “Wow, someone certainly has a lot of time on their hands.”
3. “When progressives form firing squads they stand in a circle.”
4. “Whatever happened to personal accountability?”
5. “I know it’s not politically correct to say

Wisdom and Balance

Looking back at 2010, I see that so much of what I wrote here was angry. I am still angry about those things, of course. I will still write about them here. But in 2011 I’m going to make sure and put some joy in here as well. Otherwise I’m just

Is SEO making you stupider? And other misleading titles

Last January I sat down in a bit of a mood and typed out what seemed at the time a disposable, one-off screed about the way some particularly thoughtless bloggers seem to compose their posts. It took me something like fifteen minutes. I checked for

Priorities

I see the amphitheater at Epidaurus, the toppled columns, the winter sun; I see the steam rising from the pools at Breitenbush. All this, and a spider running along the edge of a leaf, and a wet hand print fading from the rock as I watched it. It

My Ivanpah story in the Desert Report

Now that the most recent issue of the Desert Report has been out for a couple of weeks, I think it’s fair for me to repost here the article I have in said issue. There’s plenty more articles where this one came from — by other, more expert and

Stalk drearily in the high mesas

“Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas. Tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward from the meeting of the

Bone Worship: a novel by Elisabeth Eslami

This review has been a while in coming, partly because life and the accompanying events have overtaken me, but partly because after finishing Bone Worship: A Novel, I wanted to let it sit for a while before I reacted.

Full disclosure: the author

Arch-Nemesis

The phone woke me up. That pissed me off. I admit it’s not all that heard to piss me off, these days, what with the bullshit job and the emotional problems and the world’s persistent refusal to recognize my mediocre and insipid genius. Still, a

The West

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I

July 4 2006, Central Valley CA

[Way back in the first decade of the 21st Century I was briefly a guest-poster over at Michael Bérubé‘s joint, and during that period in which Michael had inexplicably entrusted me with his readership I posted this as a July 4 travelog-essay. I was