Garlic & Gauloises

Now that I’ve been picked up by a real publisher, I’ve found that I have a new family. I’m now a part of the Winter Goose Publishing family and all of us lean on and support one another. We disagree, we laugh, cheer and occasionally poke good natured fun at one another. I haven’t quite […]

Interview with The Poet

In celebration of National Poetry Month, I’ve interviewed poet Jessica Kristie. A Rod McKuen 8-Track. That was my first exposure to poetry and looking back, it didn’t resonate with me because if my sisters liked it then I wanted no part of it. And if this guy was so special, how come he didn’t have […]

“Mr. Ready’s Coming!”

  For a cook, there’s something very endearing about a cookbook that contains a recipe that begins with, “For 1,000 pounds of pork…”  For a modern chef that would translate into 12 eighty-pound cases of pork butts.  And that my friends, is a lot of pork. From Rivets and Rails, Recipes of a Railroad Boarding […]

A Review of Lowcountry Boil

Are you looking for a clever murder mystery?  One with a unique sense of place and enough quirky characters to make the cast of The Big Bang Theory take notice. Can you deal with a ghost as a central character? And I don’t mean a ghost in the traditional sense, one that fades in and […]

Barbed Wire Butterfly

  On first glance Jessica Kristie’s debut novel has a distinct Dickens’ like narrative: Kidnapped pre-teenage children living out a meager existence as slave labor of a shadowy manufacturing complex far removed from the caring eyes of civilized society. The child-laborers are coerced through beatings, rape, intimidation and starvation and should one falter then that […]

Bits of Glass

  I recently picked up one of my favorite books from my childhood, Edward Jablonski’s Flying Fortress.  It’s a highly researched and detailed account of the brave American airmen that flew B-17 bombers during World War 2.  I can remember devouring that book in fifth grade and hoping that one day I would also be […]

Bits of Glass

  I recently picked up one of my favorite books from my childhood, Edward Jablonski’s Flying Fortress.  It’s a highly researched and detailed account of the brave American airmen that flew B-17 bombers during World War 2.  I can remember devouring that book in fifth grade and hoping that one day I would also be […]

A Book Review

  Today’s forecast, grey, cold, cloudy and humid.  The day I started reading Emlyn Chand’s Torn Together, the weather mimicked the feel of the first forty pages of this novel.  20 year-old budding artist Daly English is struggling through life.  Her father has recently passed away and she is ostracized by her own mother who […]

I won a Date with Tony Bourdain

From the Fall of 2006 It’s 7:00 a.m. on a Friday morning and I’m lying in bed watching the ceiling fan as it slowly induces in me some well-deserved motion sickness. At least I am in a very nice bed and the bathroom is only a short crawl away. I’m 44 years old and I haven’t […]

A Reading Recommendation

My friend Andy Holloman’s novel, Shades of Gray is FREE on Amazon, the E-Version that is.  So if you have a Kindle or Kindle App and really enjoy a well-written, tightly constructed, edge of your seat thriller with a cleverly devised ending (everything that 50 Shades isn’t) then go click here on May 8th and […]