Nothing really to say, but here's some photos from the drive down to Los Angeles.    Heading south on 101 from the Bay Area    Zen? It felt so.    I stopped for lunch at Morro Bay. For several summers I used to come down here from Oakland to write for a few days.   [...]

A paper cut. A pain between the shoulder blades that felt like I'd been stabbed by an instrument of torture. Too many sad partings with friends and favorite places. Such are the scars with which I drove away from my home in Oakland at 6:27 p.m. on the last day of July.    Thanks to two [...]

The first week of March I flew to Austin, Texas.     When I stepped out of the hotel to find something to eat, the sun had  disappeared. My ears were immediately assaulted by a cacophony of bird sounds. The trees swarmed with birds that looked like crows but didn’t sound anything like crows. What birds [...]

Forget inspiration, forget talent, don’t worry about imagination: her advice for a new fiction writer was simple.     "Persist," she said.     Around the time I discovered Octavia Butler’s writing advice, I was still new to writing fiction. I was anxious about both inspiration and talent. I worried about imagination, since in my rather complicated life I [...]

While speaking to a few dozen friends recently, I tried out a confession.  I said that I was not really who I claimed to be; I was not as old as they knew me and that I had stolen the identity of someone older, someone who had gone through a much richer vein of experiences than [...]

Here in northern California, winter rainstorms have thoroughly soaked us. To the north of San Francisco, rivers flooded their banks and some areas were drenched with as much as nine inches of rain from a single storm.   I wasn’t affected much. Thanks to last year’s patching, my ceiling sprung no leaks this time. The neighbor upstairs [...]

Two of my friends have recently posted podcasts of their writing on the internet, one on The Writers Block at KQED in San Francisco and another at Podbazaar. I am toying with the idea of producing one of my own stories in audio and posting it here.     With podcasts, I can listen to my friends’ pieces [...]

If you go to Dhaka, Bangladesh, you may come across a place called "Bangla Motors." Buses stop there, and rickshaws, CNG’s, and taxis can get you there. It stands at the intersection of Mymensingh and Moghbazaar roads, roughly halfway between the Shonargaon and Sheraton hotels. Do not, however, look for a business by the name [...]

For a short minute this summer, it looked like the end had finally come for rickshaws in Kolkata.  But the latest news suggests that the 19th century relic has found a new lease of life.     In the streets of the capital of West Bengal, more than 20,000 men, mostly poverty-stricken migrants from Bihar, pull [...]

Today sitting at my computer at home, I learned, from the pages of a book published in 1890, that the "Backergunge cyclone of October 1876" was the most destructive to life in 19th century Bengal.  Considering the scale of the devastation, it was perhaps also one of the worst disasters worldwide.  The hurricane is described [...]