Transmissions

I made a quick stop at a neighborhood GetGo earlier this afternoon — which happens to be December 25, a day when I typically try to avoid stores of any kind at all costs. For those of you outside of the Midwest or East Coast, GetGo is a chain of gas station / grocery...

The gifts are bought and wrapped. The pantry is fully stocked for any family members and friends who come our way in the next few days. All the things that can be done – the planning, the purchasing, the preparations – have been done. We’ve come to the moment in the...

Christmas is less than two weeks away, but the title of this post may not mean what you think it means. For those too young to remember, it’s the title of a song from the soundtrack to Mary Poppins, Walt Disney’s 1964 musical adaptation of the children’s book series...

A few years ago I connected with mystery writer SJ Rozan on social media, and I had the pleasure of meeting her in person at a writer’s conference last summer. She recently expressed her disdain for the word “journey” as a description of one’s career path or life...

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” —Ernest Hemingway   By the time this post finds its way onto the interwebs, the Thanksgiving holiday will be less than twenty-four hours away. I’ve already been to the...

When I was just turning twelve, my parents gave me a stack of five brand-new paperbacks for Christmas. I seem to recall that they were chosen by my father, which was kind of rare, since my mother typically did most of the Christmas gift planning and shopping when my...

The legend of Zorro – the cunning swordsman and masked champion of 19th century California’s downtrodden masses – has been adapted to the big screen and television dozens of times since his story was first told by pulp writer Johnston McCulley more than a century ago....

As a member of the Boss army for the better part of fifty years, I walked into a screening of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere over the weekend with some measure of trepidation. I wanted to like it, but I knew I might encounter many reasons why I wouldn’t. Written...

Since the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the story has been adapted to the stage, screen, radio and television more than 120 times by American, British and European producers. Film historian Troy...

I’m not deeply immersed in the work of Elmore Leonard yet. But I’m heading in that direction. He’s best known for his gritty crime novels, many of which have been adapted to film or television and have done well commercially and critically. Jackie Brown, the 1997...