I think I just lost a blog post due to a slip of the little finger, right hand. Dang, I hate when that happens!

OK, the thing is, Nikki sent me an email asking the questions I put in this subject line, and when I came to Crimespace to look for her post so that I could reply to it in the most direct place, I couldn't find it.

I admit to having problems with what I guess you'd call technical aspects of managing my Crimespace page. I did manage to get my photo…

I have a quote on my Crimespace page: "Kindness and compassion could solve a whole lot of problems." Somebody asked me the other day what's the context, why do I have that there? So after a while, when the fact that somebody had asked was still on my mind, I decided to blog about it.

First off, it's not really a quote, nobody has said exactly those words that I know of, except me. It's there because a saying on a web page is sort of like an epitaph -- it should be something…

I have a personal blog, on the Google blog site, but I'm not going to keep it up. I'll be removing the link from my personal page here on Crimespace soon, end of this month.

Blogging is weird. Not so much here, where the focus is mystery and I have some credentials and a lot of history in the field; once in a while I do seem to have something to say that's probably worth saying. But in general I am not a good blogger. I do like to read some other people's blogs, and there are…

I think I've learned a lesson, which just goes to show that no matter how long you've been writing, or how much you've been published, it's never too late to learn. There are always surprises.

Case in point: A while back, when I finally crawled up out of my depression over no longer having a current book contract, I was actually kind of exhilarated. Even given that my track record is so poor that my agent said I'd have to write under a pseudonym. I thought "I can write anything I want…

... but because it's not possible to sustain the intensity with which I've felt this whole matter, this is likely to be the last word from me. Today's New York Times has a definitive article on what happened at Virginia Tech last week. Cho's whole life seems to have been a silent cry for help, up to the point where he decided to fight back. Unfortunately, this being Ammurrica, the way he decided to fight back was by arming himself. However long he may have had violent thoughts, we now know…

Of course everybody wants to know why Cho, the 23 year-old Korean student, shot and killed so many people at Virginia Tech (the school where my older son got his MFA, so I have some personal warm feelings for Blacksburg). Those who aren't asking Why are asking How can we prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future? The short answers are, We'll never know, and We can't. And that's true, but there are things we can know and things we can…

I've just been thinking about this, as it happens. And though nobody is reading my blog here I thought I'd post my thoughts so that I don't lose them. I believe since cave man days we humans have been telling stories as a way of explaining our world to ourselves and each other. At the present time, worldwide, we seem to be trying to evolve out of living in a society where one tribe must continually be at war with another -- though some of us have gotten farther with that than others -- and…