Blogging Toward Bethlehem

 L ike most if not all writers, I began reading -- omnivorously -- at an early age. But I was drawn to "fantastic" literature almost from the start. I read juvenile stuff like Louis Slobodkin's The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree (and its sequel), the Zip-Zip books by John Schealer, and so on -- the former being chapter books, as I now know, and the latter more like what one would call YA (young adult) fiction now. (I have since tried to find the Zip Zip books, in vain. There were at least a couple of them. Zip Zip and His Fying Saucer  was another. Zip Zip was a kid from Mars, who would punctuate his speech with occasional exclamations of "Zip!" which apparently was his way of venting excess "mental energy," or something like that, because human communication was too easy for him.) In the library of my grade school I found the Space Cat books by  Ruthven Todd, which I loved. I also came across the Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks (who also cr...

  I t's not my fault, I swear. To date, every time I have logged in here except today, I have not been able to find the New Post link. Finally I have... a week late. I tried to add a post on Thursday but failed. I know that when it comes to blogs consistency is desirable. All I can say is, I'll keep trying to be consistent. Meanwhile, what the hell we were talking about? Oh yes, I see that I was going to talk about how I got interested in writing. I grew up in Fairfield CT during the 1950s and 60s. My mother, Mildred, was a big reader, and there were always books around. My dad did some reading, too, but his taste was limited to Westerns. You know, Zane Gray and so on. Grey? Whatever. Mom was broader -- fiction as well as non-fiction. She would go to the library about once a week, and I was brought along. While she made her choices I wandered around the stacks. The second level had a glass tile floor, which delighted and terrorized me. I always expected it to break, but of co...

I 'm still learning my way around this whole blogging thing. I am supposedly -- supposedly -- updating this thing every Wednesday and Sunday. Well, today is Sunday and I forgot to do it before now, which is 6:15 pm.  In the interest of keeping this short, because supper is almost ready. I will simply say that this week I submitted two short stories, a new one and one that has been making the rounds. I also did some work on the cozy mystery I am ghostwriting. Ghostwriting is something I have come to enjoy over these past few years. I started out by doing an autobiography for a former member of the writers group I was a member of back in Doylestown. He was a fairly well-known clinical psychologist. I enjoyed the experience, though I have since learned how to do it better. My next ghostwriting gig took place a couple of years later and was easier for me, as it was a science-fiction novel. I'd previously (and subsequently) written and published a fair bit of sf over the years, so t...

T his being the initial post of my blog, I should give some sort of mission statement. I'm a writer, editor, ghostwriter, illustrator and cartoonist, occasionally occupied as a musician. I'll use this blog as a way of communicating with my readers and fans. It may be profound at times, but probably not very often. That said, I do take my creative life very seriously. I always have. I have a fairly large body of work in terms of writing and art. Though much of it is scattered hither and yon, a lot of it exists in my files--if you can call a bunch of boxes and files full of manuscripts drawings "files." They aren't in any particular order. I should do something about that one of these days. I have done a bit of blogging before, but in truth I prefer to spend my time actually writing as opposed to journaling or what-have-you. I did a cartoon blog of sorts a few years back, Iggy's Almanac . I'll include some of that stuff here as time goes by. If I could find...