It’s easy to go big when you’re thinking about starting new habits. That’s a mistake. Changing everything all at once means you’ve lost your stability. You need to make small changes first, let them become habits, and then repeat. That’s what I’ve discovered, this year. I’ve n... →

I’m your dad. You’re brand new here. There are a lot of things I want to share with you. We’ll get to experience them with your sister, and your mom, and it’ll be a lot of fun. This isn’t the whole list—the list is pretty long—... →

Drinking from a firehose. So I went to a seminar taught by Sifu Francis Fong, head of the Francis Fong International Association (of which my school is a member). Sifu Fong teaches Sifu Raja, and he’s been teaching Sigong Al since the eighties. Not only was it a good op... →

The cliche is real. I started writing The Wire Road because of a dream. That’s half-true. I started writing it because of a dream, and then also a road sign on the interstate. The dream provided the inspiration for the protagonist and his quest. The dream was in first pe... →

Reflections on Wing Chun, in an occasionally recurring feature. Two years ago, I was recuperating from a pretty bad illness. When Father’s Day rolled around, my wife gave me a great gift: she told me she’d pay for one month of martial arts, and all I needed to do w... →

I like having my own website. There are a lot of systems humming away. And there’s even more involved in keeping up a local development environment. I use Homebrew on my Mac to operate an Apache server with PHP, mariaDB, and Composer. There’s a little frisson of satisfaction in r... →

November was not a great month. We were all set to celebrate the first Thanksgiving in a decade I wasn’t working retail. We had set the itinerary, told the families, and packed the car. Tuesday night my daughter got sick. Wednesday, I got sick. Friday, it was my wife’s tu... →

National Novel Writing Month is upon us. The official challenge is 1,700 words a day for 30 days, leading up to a 50,000 word first draft. I’m playing it a little differently. I want to get back on the horse and make writing a daily habit. My target, at least for the fi... →

I’m old enough to have seen the transition from film photography to digital. Before I went to Italy with my high school Latin class, I received a Fuji 35mm camera as a present, to memorialize the trip. For the most part, that was the kind of occasion I took ph... →

In 2006, some friends wanted me to photograph their wedding. I had a 35mm film camera and a fixed-lens digital, but I knew I’d need something bigger for portraits and enlargements. So I looked on eBay. A little scene-setting: I lived in Austin, alone, and I’d had dental surgery. It w... →

You can’t escape Grace, they told me. You’re made for each other. It was good. Could hear the church organ blaring fortissimo, smell the flowers. I left. Town, her, everything I knew. Mad scramble out west without a plan or clue. On my back, on a woven blanket in c... →

I pry the ring off my finger in the Jet Blue lounge. I leave it on the cocktail napkin next to my empty glass. I raise my hand to the woman at the other end of the bar. Her eyes are chilled hunger. A twenty covers the bill, and covers ... →

I don’t like “worldbuilding.” The word is unnecessary. All writing is construction, from the sentence to the scene. And all writing, all of it, requires placement. Making up a portmanteau for something every writer does already is both unnecessary and pretentious. You’ll encounter it more in certain circles of the f... →

Eschatology is a fixture of civilization. No matter where you look, you find people waiting for the end. It happened in the mid-1800s with the Millerites. It happened in 1992, with the conservative opposition naming Bill Clinton the Antichrist. It happened in 2012, across the scale, from New Age-inspired fears of ... →

The new year makes for the perfect time to consider yourself. Where you’ve been, what you want to accomplish. A lot of us make resolutions around this time. And a lot of us will note that most resolutions don’t last. “New year, new you,” the slogans go. But we aren’... →