Authors Electric

Umberto Tosi, New Year's Eve, 2026 "Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph, " wrote  Thomas Paine to George Washington in the darkest days of the American Revolution when the British Empire seemed invincible.  Mad King Donald-abused  America needs more Thomas Paines right now.  " These are the times that try men's souls," Paine wrote. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."  George Washington , then commander in chief of a demoralized, underfunded Continental Army promptly  had Paine's  The American Crisis   pamphlet, read aloud to them. Thomas Paine-Laurent Davos By the 1990s, when my youngest daughter took her first steps, I blessed the stars that seemed to finally give her generation respite from...

I got a hell of a surprise about two weeks ago. It was just a few days after my 81st birthday. My inamorata Eleanor was downstairs helping the neighbors with a garage sale. I had been brushing my teeth, getting ready to join my youngest daughter, Zoë, for a brunch when it happened.    My latest, soon to be released short story collection. That's me at Bread & Puppets Theater Museum in Glover, VT, opening another fabulous summer season tomorrow. She was on one of her periodic Chicago visits from Indiana University at Bloomington where she is a doctoral candidate in cognitive science. Her birthday falls just after mine and we always celebrate together. I finished brushing and tried to leave the bathroom and - surprise! The door wouldn't open! The doorknob just turned round and round helplessly without moving the latch. I rattled it, wiggled it. turned it again. Nothing. I tried prying the latch with a pair of nail scissors. Nothing. The door was clearly unlocked,...

Lately, I've been reading – or I should say, tripping on – The Beginning of Infinity [New York, Penguin Group, 2011] by Oxford theoretical physicist David Deutsch , also best-selling author of The Fabric of Reality . Professor Deutsch speculates that much of what happens in fiction is close to a reality somewhere in the multiverse . As a writer, I find that comforting, especially when I postulate that Deutsch's projection could just as well apply to the abandoned narratives that litter my garden of forking drafts.      Maybe the happenings in my uncompleted drafts actually occurred in dimensions where momentary universes collapse due to off-kilter physical laws. Not being a mathematician, I can't work out the equations, but this projection might serve me well in offsetting blame for failed drafts. It wasn't me. It was those darn skewed dimensions. Indeed, as I wrote them, everything seemed to be going along just fine until, one day I open the file and, nightmare...