The final installment of a gripping saga of one writer writing things and being in a castle.
23 February 2004
FEAR OF HOT CHOCOLATE
Went to Edinburgh again today. This trip was a DREAM compared to the last one. First, left earlier. Caught bus immediately. Was in the city by 10:15. Had coffee at a fantastic place called [...]

Part four of rollicking saga about books, and sitting, and writing too many things down, all within the confines of a castle.
19 February 2004
There is something about this place that occasionally makes we want to bang my head against my desk and just keep banging and banging until I lose consciousness. I can’t quite put [...]

Chapter three in a seemingly never-ending saga about an idiot in a castle.
15 February 2004
We’ve come to understand something. This is not so much a retreat as it is a psychological experiment. I’m completely serious about this. It’s more to get the experience of being unhooked. And it has kind of unhooked us all. Nigel [...]

This is the second installment of The Badger Diary . . . my never before published personal account of a month spent in a Scottish castle, writing 13 Little Blue Envelopes. You can read the first installment here.
February 12, con’t
5:55 PM
Minor adventure.
I had been fighting off the overwhelming desire to go to sleep [...]

Here is a question every author* hates: “Where do you get your ideas from?”
The answer is: MY HEAD, but people want something more specific than that. They want something authorly and evocative that makes me seem smart. “I pull them out of my a$%,” is not the kind of thing that sounds good when [...]

As I am here in the London Office, I wanted to continue my study of English and American cultures. Today, I am going to talk about television.
When I was a tiny mj, you could only see UK shows on public television, which seemed like the territory of shut-ins, math teachers, and people who had [...]

Happy New Year, friends! I hope you had a great New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Eve tends to be one of those events that has a HUGE build up, but actually turns out to be a.) freezing cold and b.) best summarized like this:

Mine New Year’s Eve was very enjoyable . . . and I [...]