You don’t knit? That’s not the point. Many people are reserving bombed out Airbnb’s in Ukraine, not because they have a yen for vacationing amidst rubble with a side of air raid sirens. Scheduling a Ukrainian Airbnb you never intend to use is a way of putting cash into the…

Hint: It’s not about selling books. — Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you’ve heard about Shawn Warner, author of the young adult murder mystery novel Leigh Howard and the Ghosts of Simmons-Pierce Manor, who shot up to the top of Amazon’s best-seller charts, simply for looking glum while trying to sell…

In case you’ve forgotten. — Seventy-eight years ago, humanity ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When President Truman gave the order to greenlight the Manhattan Project after President Roosevelt’s death, he possibly saved my brother’s life. Jack was serving on a submarine in the Pacific at the time, and without the bombs, it’s estimated that Japan would have continued to fight the war, not to victory; they knew they couldn’t win…

Do you play with your food? Try playing with your writing. — If you think Mama and Dada were your first attempts at language, it’s because you can’t remember your first few days of life. If you could recall recognizing the faces of your caregivers checking on your comfort, the joy when saw a sibling replace a teething ring in your mouth…

Make every word you write publishable. My lesson from an early job interview. — Just because we call it a writing practice doesn’t mean you can’t publish your daily writing. Make your writing practice count. I learned this valuable lesson as a very young job seeker applying for a secretarial position back in the horse and buggy days. To pass the entry requirements, I…

Let me tell you about Sean Duffy and Carol Lennox — Okay, so Sean Duffy isn’t a real person. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t need grief counseling when I came to the end of Adrian McGinty’s series about the Catholic policeman’s run-ins with the IRA during the ’80s Troubles in Northern Ireland. And if you think I was just a…

Unless you’re so old you’ve forgotten where you put it — Let’s set the record straight. I might be qualified to take your teddy bear’s temperature, but just because I once worked for a doctor, that doesn’t give me the right to dispense medical advice. But I’ll still tell you how I cured my writing block. Talking about my medical condition is one of the unintended consequences of getting old. …

What does it take to save a drowning man? In the ongoing rich man-poor man, down to the bottom of the sea saga of the Titan, many have reminded us that if only, oh, if ONLY, our attention had not been cruelly diverted to the frivolous escapade of five heedless…

I have something better. — I don’t have a best friend. But don’t weep for me, Argentina. All my friends are my best friends. Let me meander for a minute, and I’ll explain. This notion came to me last night because I was forced into bingeing a social experiment masked as a TV show, or…