Authors Electric

Working like dogs, w/Nibblick, & MJain Liars want to eat my neighborhood again. Their threat is clearer and more immediate this time. With deadlocked polls putting him in short-fingered reach of the U.S. Presidency again, Hair Hitler vows to round up tens of millions of people - immigrants and anyone opposing him he can "denaturalize" - and put them in concentration camps. Even Demagogue Don admits his political pogrom - involving the military, and local police - would be a blood-soaked affair. But, like the purges of Stalin and other genocidal strongmen Trump adulates - purges would aim at terrorizing the populace and consolidating dictatorial power for him and his cronies. Chicago does El Grito (Sun Times) It's not politics. It's personal. Tumpistas have put my blended family and my mixed neighborhood in their  orange crosshairs, just as they did during Trump's first White House term, There can only be one response. Nope! We're not going back! In the wee...

 Happy Holiday from your AE Santa! NOTE: portions re-posted from 2015: Musings of a undercover Santa: The thing about being a writer is that we're forever superimposing narratives onto our experiences, even the most mundane. Of course, to tell stories is human. Writers just get deeper into that stream of consciousness. Our imaginary hypertexts can seem compelling, even brilliant, until we sit down and try to write them coherently with a semblance of style. Then they jackknife, ideas askew as a wrecked train. Although I didn't get around to making a story out of them for a long time, my thirty straight days as a Macy's Department Store Santa Claus in downtown San Francisco were like that – mental voice-over video-cams running the whole time, a multi-dimensional theme park ride that stays with me, a Yuletide LSD trip, during which I teetered on the edge of delusion just to see how far it could go. Writing is a kind of madness, after all. T'was the month before Christmas a...

 " ... The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die."   -- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way    From Stepanie Heuet's 2019 graphic novel adaptation It's been twenty five years since I last dove into Proust. I was living in San Francisco. The Millennium was still a couple of years off. I had my first cell phone, a nifty flip device. Looking back, I see that I was living  in two worlds - at least. I stretched myself between a demanding Silicon Valley start-up job and being an over-age, doting, divorced dad to a precocious, late-in-life eight-year old.  It was no more harried a lifestyle than that of many single parents, mostly moms, but that didn't make it any easier. I had zero time for much of anything reflective, enlight...

  I've always been ambivalent about having cut my teeth in the cigar-hazed city room of the Los Angeles Times , then a 1960s metropolitan newspaper with more editorial lineage than any other nationwide. That was back in the days when "stop-the-presses" could be taken literally! I can never figure out if that initiation by printers' ink sharpened or dulled me as a latter-day author. My early years as a journalist, followed by decades of magazine freelancing and sitting behind an editor's desk certainly instilled me with deadline discipline and fetishes for facts, factoids and specificity. I've always feared my nose would grow if I didn't get whatever I was writing right. It was always a balancing act on the high wire of deadlines. Self-doubt and existential angst be damned! Get it right, or leave it out. Get your best in on time.  But no dithering. To succeed, the working journalist must become tougher than the average literary bear.  Mary Ford - author of...