I earn more writing novels than short stories — and you probably will too — For several years now, I’ve been earning the majority of my income by writing fiction under a variety of pen names you’ve never heard of. And it isn’t anything special about me. Thousands of authors you’ve never heard of are quietly making a full-time living creating fiction. True, thousands of…

A migrating hummingbird finds a sleep spot in my garden — It’s been another big year for migrating Ruby-throated Hummingbirds. While I feel like I proved last year that a Nikon Coolpix P610 isn’t quite good enough to capture a hummingbird, I’m secretly pleased with this photo even though you can’t call it especially sharp or professional. You can still see…

A high-energy heart chakra stone that looks like candy — This week’s photographs feature various items from my Rhodochrosite collection. Try not to drool. Decades ago, when I was still new to the stone-cutting hobby, I stumbled into an old stash of over a hundred pounds of this luscious material from Argentina. The financially savvy move would have been to…

Can you spot the dinosaurs roaming at its feet? — Today’s photographs are quick snapshots grabbed courtesy my Samsung Galaxy 8. The star of the show is a large “landscape” or “garden feature” Arkansas quartz crystal cluster that we bought off somebody’s front lawn in the early 1990s in those days when we drove around in a beat-up white Ford…

If you had the opportunity to meet an entity from another world, would you take it? — It was 1999, maybe early 2000. Under the influence of multiple green apple martinis, I had wandered alone into a mostly empty theater showing The Blair Witch Project. Drunk when I stumbled in, drunk when I stumbled out, I found myself walking lost and long through dark, strangely empty streets. …