Authors Electric

Now, here's a trick photo for you, a trompe l'oeil to rival the best. Have a look.   Look once and you'll see--no, not a crone who transforms to a girl when you blink--no, you'll see something more surprising:  two stackable steps six inches high a handicapped writer fights daily to climb so he can climb higher to seven. Why seven? Because that, to my changed way of thinking, is now the key to the kingdom. At year's end I'll move from my small ground-floor studio into a spacious one-bedroom apartment--with an office and  I'll be on the second floor, though, with a fifteen-step stairway whose risers measure seven inches. That's a cake walk to most of you; but I'm still recovering from my June total knee replacement and my knee flexion is still less than it should be: 110-120 degrees. At 105-108 degrees flexion, I can climb comfortably up and down the four-inch red base. But the sound effects began when I added a black two-inch second step. My mule-stu...

The prettiest picture I ever did see shows two mountains engaged in a passionate hug. Oh, I know what you're thinking: There you go again with your damned tomfoolery, always waxing wise with words when wise has already been waxed! There's not a mountain to be seen--just a 9th draft on a laptop screen and a brand new Moleskine notebook centered on its keyboard. But cut me, please, a little slack.  For me, spelling out 'mountains of work' would have been less honest. Not to say that either the 9th draft or the Moleskine used to outline the next book for months would have been a piece of cake if not for a couple of curveballs I couldn't have foreseen. But while I convalesced from total knee replacement, I'd planned to breeze through this last draft on my laptop instead of printing out the 8th draft and working on a hard copy, which I'd then need to transcribe. And I could do this in my Bedder writing corner, taking breaks now and then to fill more pages of the ...

I couldn't have done it without James Bond: have a total knee replacement operation on 3/5...go home the following day...survive the first couple of weeks filled with level 10 pain...try to not go stir-crazy from my inability to sit or stand for longer than 10 minutes at a time...and somehow figure out a way that I could continue to write.  For the first 7 days, I had a care companion. But even after the first day, one thing became painfully clear: I needed gadgets, lots of gadgets worthy of James Bond if I was to prevail. And so...              An Illustrated GT My Dirty Decuple 1) The Magic Gadget Bed a) A bed becomes a gadget when it has as many functions as a Swiss Army knife. Long before surgery, I realized that I needed a much higher mattress than I'd been accustomed to using. For a six-foot man with a knee replacement, I wanted a height close to 30" instead of the 17" height I'd been using.  I chose a Nectar foam mattress for comfort a...