Alien spacecraft have been observed often where I live in the Hudson River Valley of upstate New York. Not far from me is the town of Pine Bush, also called the UFO capital of the world because of the number of strange occurrences there since the 1960s. But it is not the only place in the valley that has documented extraterrestrial visitors. …

Have you been in the middle of writing a story and suddenly come up with a better idea? Or maybe you felt bored with your story and wanted to toss it? Perhaps you showed your draft to someone and their response was lukewarm?

Writing a different story is a great idea — after you’ve finished the one you’re writing now.

Here is why.

The Three Trolls

Three things are usually front and center when you want to stop writing what you’re working on. One is perfectionism. The second one is fear. The third one is distrust. …

How will people in the future know you existed? What evidence will they be able to seek out about who you were and how you lived? If it is all on your cell phone, that could become a mystery, indeed, for the technology could go obsolete.

Thinking on this, I wanted to reassure myself I had such evidence of my life on hand, a paper trail a future archaeologist (maybe from another planet or galaxy) could find on one of their digs, since paper is far more likely to last than the bits and bytes of a smartphone or streaming…

Who can resist a good mystery? It is one of the most popular genres and shows up not just in novels and short stories but also in movies, television, video games, board games, and live action “Mystery Weekends” at resorts and on cruise ships.

Reading a mystery gives us a respite from all kinds of anxiety and worry, as well as offering a wonderful entertainment. Involved in its characters and puzzles, we forget our own preoccupations and trials and stress.

While the element of mystery is a part of all storytelling, true mystery as a genre is different from the…

For years I wondered why certain things drew me in that had nothing to do with my immediate life and work, things that seemed more than a passing interest. I would feel a sense of rightness about them, and familiarity, though I didn’t know what I meant by that.

I would hear music from the Renaissance and my spirit would soar. I walked into a medieval abbey and knew my way around. I visited Neolithic monoliths in Britain and had the overwhelming feeling I was home.

On a journey from Massachusetts to California, I drove on a long, magnificent, desolate…

The man shaded his eyes and looked out to the sea. He started to speak to his wife. Lisa’s straw hat hid her face from him, but he knew she wasn’t asleep. All right, he decided, a swim on my own it is.

The water was an impossible blue, like the glittering sea of his childhood. All those lost summers appeared before him, held in some strange stasis, unbidden until then.

He dove deep down, and opened his eyes. To his surprise the water was green, almost opaque, the sand racing around his body and shutting out the light. Gradually…

One of the most stressful experiences I had in corporate was knowing a product was going to market unfinished. Yes, there was a deadline, mandated months or a year before by the powers that be, but it had been an unrealistic deadline to start with. Why did every single product have to go out to the customers with loose ends dangling from it, sometimes literally?

I worked mainly in software, but also in telecommunications and physical setups of networks. My job was to write about them, explain them, demonstrate their usefulness, and give steps on how to make them work…