New Gold City

Below you will find the first few pages of a story featured in my new collection Implosions of America: Nine Stories , due out this fall.  African Violets One of our kids started Claudie out with an African violet about a year ago. She put it on our kitchen window sill above the sink. Right around then I started thinking about the fact that I seemed to be on the way out of our marriage. It wasn’t Claudie, it was me.   After a month in our kitchen, the plant was almost dead. I found her at 5:30 one morning standing at the sink crying. “We’re going to kill every plant that enters our house,” she said softly. “What does that say about us?” Claudie cries quietly when she’s mad at herself. I know enough to keep my mouth shut when she’s crying quietly. “Look at this thing,” she continued between sniffs. “I love its furry leaves. Even now.” She was still taking deep breaths, but seemed to be on the downside of her pain. I peered at the plant and sure enough, its wilted leaves ha...

I've written about book bloggers in the past. I recently had an op-ed piece published at TalkingWriting.com that brought bloggers up as the solution to fake and paid reviews on Amazon. You can read that piece, "Can You Trust Online Reviews?" here . It's a prelude to the column I will be writing for TalkingWriting.com called "Talking Indie." Watch for the column's first entry in November.  Today, though, I wanted to point folks towards one of the more creative and exuberant book blogger sites you'll ever find, CabinGoddess.com. Kristine Morton, aka Cabin Goddess, is truly remarkable. You need to bookmark her site and read her reviews. Also, her bacon porn references are downright oral.  Kriss just posted a little conversation I had with Janie Hawthorn (who happens to appear in the title story of my new, soon to be released collection, Implosions of America ) in the middle of the country about the meaning of Beyond the Will of God (which she is also a...