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Monthly Archives: October 2012

Crossing the River

In 2006, I wrote this short short story as my entry in a contest called “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. The story had to turn around this photo. It’s odd, I felt awkward writing to a visual prompt, but the story took no more than a couple of days to write. I still like it, so I’ve dusted it off for your reading entertainment.

 

Crossing the River

By spring the pain had dulled. It was no longer the unrelenting ripping sensation in Jake’s chest, as if he were a phone book being torn in half for a meaningless party stunt. Although he still was ambushed by grief occasionally, and wept helplessly then, he mostly now had calm. At first that calm had been the vague sweetness of Prozac, but Jake was done with that.

The counselors at the hospice had helped. They had gently prepared him last …

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A man’s character is his fate.

This is the epigraph in Traveling Light, and has become an essential part of the way I see and experience the world. Sometimes this quote is translated as, “A man’s character is his doom.” I believe that’s technically more accurate, but the word “doom” in English has implications that aren’t so inescapably negative in Greek.

A Hero’s Journey

I wrote this piece seven years ago, as a piece of blog content when my first novel came out. To my amazement, it was the most visited page for as long as I had it up. I’ve dusted it off, made a few tweaks and offer it now as my first article here on my re-vamped site. It feels good to do that. I hope you enjoy it! — LM

A Hero’s Journey

I was probably thirteen when I first read that some of the great Renaissance artists dissected cadavers to get the anatomy right in their figures. Forced to imagine someone so driven to depict the human form accurately that he would willingly break serious contemporary laws and risk disease to examine dead bodies, I was disgusted as only a pimply teenager uncomfortable with what was happening in his own body could be.  But over time, I have come …

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