My special needs brother’s obsession with the printed book This is my special needs brother Eric John, the day before his 55th birthday. We are in one of EJ’s favorite places, our family’s woodland cabin in Arroyo Seco, California, very near the north entrance to Los Padres National Forest. The…

Why Impostor Syndrome afflicts writers, and how we can take steps to conquer it — Sitting in workshops, preparing to submit work, reading the work of our fellow writers, or just sitting at work at our writing tables, we writers are often stopped cold by thoughts of: Who do I think I am? I’m no [Stephen King | J.K. Rowling | Dan Brown]! …

An open letter to Mark Zuckerberg first published Sept. 23, 2018 on the Deucerman at Random blog Dear Mark, I’m not a social media expert, but I play one on the internet. This is why I’m able to give you the following advice that will solve all the problems of…

Dispatches from our search for the right place to spend the rest of our lives This third article in the Finding Home series takes us to the East San Francisco Bay Area, where decades of smart suburban planning have transformed the small agricultural town of Livermore into a California wine…

Dispatches from our search for the right place to spend the rest of our lives — This second article in the Finding Home series takes us to the north Monterey Bay beach town of Santa Cruz. We spent three weeks there in July and August, when we could experience a bit of the heavy tourist season, as well as that busy period when University of California…

Dispatches from our search for the right place to spend the rest of our lives — In America in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, lots of people are seizing the chance to dramatically change their lives. In my case, the pandemic accelerated changes my wife Caroline and I had been planning for years: we both retired early from our Silicon Valley careers, and we sold…

You took the time to write your very best book, only to suffer the anguish of seeing another writer beat you to the punch. Now what? — ‘Don’t Hurry’ As writers, we’re often advised, “Don’t hurry. Take the time to write your very best story.” And, of course, it’s good advice. But once you’ve been at it for a while as an author, this commitment to creative languor can lead to some wrenching growing pains.

To deal with the challenge of social media, we’ll all have to suffer — The writer and activist Rob Spillman recently wrote in Lithub about the wanton theft of his Twitter account and its 11,000+ followers by a hacker in Kuala Lumpur. Spillman is circumspect, describing both the immense social and professional value of the account and the dual agonies of violation by the…

Teen-age hijinks and white privilege in the Santa Clara Valley — In an essay titled “The Hard Crowd” in the 1/18/21 issue of the New Yorker, the author Rachel Kushner recounts her youth in San Francisco, in the Sunset district where she lived and in Haight-Ashbury and the Tenderloin, where she had brushes with prostitutes, addicts, and punks. …