There are 81 blog posts for you to enjoy.
What the Watercolor Leaves Out
October 10, 2026
I've been posting a quote a day for over three years. Somewhere north of a thousand of them now. Lately I've been going back through the old ones, rechecking sources and fixing the text color, sometimes backgrounds, and I've learned something I didn't expect to learn.
It isn't that I got a lot of attributions wrong; though I did get a few wrong, the internet is such fun when you're trying to get to the source of anything (sarcasm). The problem is that the format itself does something to a sentence, and I hadn't been paying attention to it.
Read MoreDepth Hooks: Why Good Stories Leave Something Behind
October 3, 2026
Depth Hooks: Why Good Stories Leave Something Behind
When a Story Has More World Than Plot
When I wrote Kidnapped Again?, I had no idea I would later write a sequel. I didn’t plant hooks. I didn’t leave little glowing breadcrumbs for a future book. I was simply trying to write the story in front of me as honestly and completely as I could.
After draft 5, and idea came to mind for a sequel. I started writing the story Now What? and halfway through, something unexpected happened.
Read MoreBooks, Music, AI, and the Strange Boundaries of Copyright Law
September 26, 2026
I saw a comment somewhere - I don't remember where - that if a book is legally purchased, for example, by an LLM business, they have the right to absorb/use the text, but then they have to destroy the book afterward. Something like that. What about this?
I almost certainly saw a muddled description of the Anthropic copyright case. There's a real grain of truth in it, but it is not a general rule that an AI company may buy a book, train on it, and then must destroy it.
Read MoreSeven Years Teaching English, and I Never Noticed This
September 19, 2026
I just came across this on one of the SM sites, and I've never noticed it before, not in 7 years of TEFLing in CO, not on any of the many websites I've read about TEFLing or English in general: If you replace the "w" in "what" "when" and "where" with a "t" you get the answer to each question. So, that makes me wonder: is this an oddity in English that came about by chance? It must be, languages don't develop by design.
It isn't merely a chance oddity, although the remarkably tidy modern spelling makes it look like one.
Read MoreAI Can Help Write the Words Without Becoming the Author
September 12, 2026
The debate over AI-assisted writing often begins with a questionable assumption: if artificial intelligence helped produce some of the words, the human can no longer claim to be the author.
That view reduces authorship to typing. It assumes the author is simply the person who manually constructs every sentence, one word at a time. But authorship has always involved far more than placing words on a page.
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I used to teach English as a foreign language in Barranquilla, Colombia. Now I'm retired and traveling throughout South America.
I'm from Kennewick, Washington, USA. In my previous life, as I call it, I was an IT guy, systems administrator, computer tech, as well as a shipping/receiving guy and also worked as a merchandising guy in a RV/Camping store.