All Good News!

Hope you’re very well. Letting you know about some pieces of good news. My story Latin Jazz? is now published in a literary magazine called Dime Show Review. This is Volume 2 and includes essays and poems along with the stories. You can find it online at www.dimeshowreview.com or pick up a paperback copy on Amazon. (Speaking of poetry – you’ll find a poem of mine when you scroll down – had my father in mind when I wrote it. Hope you enjoy.) 

Also announcing here a release of a movie I wrote with my son Justin called The Ghost of New Orleans (original title: The Little Murder.) It has a solid cast, and it’s so good to see that writing credit with both our names. That happened once before on a TV film we wrote called Parallels. Fun. And BTW, my other son Zack and his wife Ami both write books in the Romance genre under the names Nico Rosso and Eva Leigh or Zoe Archer. Fine writers all.

And on April 12, I’ll be in Salt Lake City giving a talk to the Film Society there presenting “Ten Tips From the Writing Trenches,” all material culled from my how-to book on creative writing: WRITE! Find the Truth in Your Fiction. Which means…making fiction FEEL REAL to the reader. This book is also online in both digital and paperback formats from Amazon.

After the talk, I’ll be screening my film from 2015, Words and Pictures, staring the very exciting duo of Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche. Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet – streaming or DVD or Blu-Ray.

Hope you and yours are fine. We’re thriving with two new standard poodle pups joining our family!

(Oh, here’s that poem)

The Highway

I’m taking California’s 101 South to L.A.
nd the ocean’s on my left, no, on my right,
and I’m doing 75 past the site of Port Hueneme
so I touch my neck, feeling for the chain,
pull out a navy I.D. tag, and shake it so it jingles.
Maybe somebody sees me from the other lane, wondering
why that old man is jingling his necklace that way,
so I explain and say my dad was a sailor in ’44
stationed at Hueneme and after that had a long
life and a grocery store, and when he died, there
wasn’t much. I chose the I.D. tag and my brother
picked the watch, so when I pass this place
I picture dad in the photo in his sailor clothes,
white hat, happy and bewildered face, 35
years old and his youngest son only 3, so I didn’t
know him yet, and he didn’t know me, but maybe
I was on his mind, and now he’s on mine when I
pass here and see the sign, so I jingle the tag to say
hello to the sailor he used to be and hope the sound
somehow connects him to me, because there wasn’t
nearly enough connecting, though he lived to 82,
and maybe there never is, is what I’d say to you or
whoever saw me in the red Prius on 101, a man of
70 waving a chain because he’s still somebody’s son.