Earlier this year--Tuesday, April 28th, to be exact--my good friend, Katherine Cox, saw a dream become reality when she placed a freshly minted copy of her book, Katie Fry Private Eye, on the shelves of the bookstore where she's worked for the past several years. Each day, she would arrive to work and be surrounded by books, which at times could feel like being among old friends, offering solitary comfort in their rich and imaginative pages, and other times it could feel like being surrounded by the competition, reminding her that shelves upon shelves of other people were living her dream and that she wasn't there yet. Nevertheless, the word "yet," is ...

August has been a bit of a complicated month for me. There has been as much cause for celebration as there has been for apprehension. I’ve been a bit tongue-tied by the goings-on of the month as is evidenced by the radio silence from my otherwise noisy keyboard. It’s not writer’s block, per se, but rather a flood of dissonant thoughts scattered across my neuropathways that are in constant competition for focus and attention. The best way I can describe it is to imagine standing in a field full of fireflies, where from a distance one can appreciate the beauty of the sporadic pulses of lights. However, when you venture to examine a specific bug in ...