This YouTube comment represents what I love about the internet.

From user "CokeCookies" on one of the "Moves Like Jagger" videos:

This song makes me wanna strip naked, burst out of my window, free fall 28 floors, faceplant in the snow, make a snow angel mixed with my own blood, shiver from the cold, get hypothermia, DIE, go the pearly gate, say wuzzup to Jesus, do our secret hand shake, look for Buddha, find him, have him reincarnate me into a frog, meet a princess, kiss her, turn into a prince, order my subjects to bring me a computer, listen to this song again, sleep, Wake up.. Repeat.

Bravo, sir.

From the old blog 4: The day I got completely worked by my three-year-old.

This afternoon, I went to pick my son up at daycare. When I got there, I found that he was trying to hug one of the girls in his class (to protect the identity of the unhuggable, I'll call her Betty) without her permission. No matter how many times I told him he had to ask her permission or the teacher showed him how easy it was to get Betty's permission, he flat-out refused. He kept trying to hug, we kept stopping him, rinse, repeat.

He got bored of this game and started to run around the room. He passed by Betty and put a shoulder into her...not enough to hurt her or knock her down, but enough to be rude.

So what does Dad...the boss, the smart one...do?

I tell Nate that he has to go apologize to Betty. And he does the standard apology: an "I'm sorry" accompanied by...

...a big hug, of course, met with open arms.

To recap: After several minutes of refusing to let my son hug a girl without her permission, he decides to Jedi mind trick me into ordering him to hug her. Which she welcomes.

1-zip, Nate.

Here's another free short story from "Underneath."

I just hit the 500 follower mark on Twitter, which was a goal I'd set for the weekend. I said that if I reached that goal, I would post another free short story from "Underneath: Short Tales of Horror and the Supernatural." Granted, the whole collection is free on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but still. This is more convenient. 

Here we go.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Cliches and other stuff that you'll never see in my writing.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, so let's jump right in.

* "Where are we? More like when are we?"

* A hard-drinking cop whose next case will either save his life...or end it.

* By the same token, said cop's screaming sergeant/lieutenant.

You might not be a writer, but I sure as Hell am.

A few weeks ago, I posted about the general disbelief that I've experienced from other people when I tell them I'm a novelist.

This topic came to the forefront of my mind a couple of days ago due to a Twitter conversation. Twitter Goddess* Julie Anne Lindsey related a conversation with her neighbor in which he commented that she'd "wasted a year of her life" writing a novel.

I've been simmering about it ever since, mostly because of all the responses I'll never get to deliver. They'd go something like this: