Kindle Readers Are Readers. Just Ask My Mother.

As I said in an earlier post, the arrival of my Kindle truly reawakened my passion for reading. The ease of finding, purchasing, carrying around a new book whenever I wanted, all without requiring me to find a new space on my already crowded shelves, has turned me back into the reader I used to be. But that doesn’t hold a candle to what it did for my mother.

She was constantly reading as long as I can remember. A visit from my sister, Maureen, would usually involve the exchange of multiple books before they parted. But Mom is now 85. Her knees and back aren’t what they used to be. Spending hours browsing the shelves of her local Borders was no longer in the cards for her, even before Borders went to that Big Bankruptcy Court in the Sky. Some time last year, she was actually reaching the point where the stack of books next to her favorite chair was down to its last volume. At that time her knee was really bothering her, so the idea of going to Barnes and Noble really didn’t appeal to her. Then her youngest son came over with his new purchase, the latest (at the time) Amazon Kindle.

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Rekindling the Fire…

As I mentioned in my first post, I recently unearthed one of the last things I completed, a short story entitled “Passing Sentence.” My file dates tell me that I wrote the thing back in the year 2000. It’s genuinely depressing to realize that a whole decade passed without me writing anything meaningful. (Computer manuals, while hopefully useful, do not exercise one’s creative jones).

So what was the problem? Continue reading “Rekindling the Fire…”

So here is what happened….

Late last year submitted a short story to Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s called “Passing Sentence,” and I wrote it quite some time ago. I’m not sure exactly how long it’s been, but I found files in the same folder with dates reaching back to the year 2000. That can’t be right, because this is one of the last things that I completed before this year, and that would mean that I took nearly a ten-year break from writing.

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