Dave's diaries: Life, writing and more

My new short story: The Sweet Boys

April 28, 2025 The Sweet Boys is about a special bond between brothers whose family is plunged into a dark time when Ethan, the oldest son, is suddenly sent away. His little brother Tommy misses him terribly, can’t understand why he had to leave, and gets the feeling his parents aren’t telling him the real… Read more
Revolution remembered

April 15, 2025 When we celebrated the Bicentennial of our founding in 1976, I was fresh out of college, underemployed, and generally too busy to care. Now we’re sliding into the 250-year Semiquincentennial (yes, that’s a real word), beginning at Lexington and Concord with the anniversary of the shot heard ’round the world on April… Read more
Advice to writers: Build that wall

April 1, 2025 Being a writer means going over, around, and through the obstacles on a never-ending course: block, rejections, readers’ changing tastes, and vanishing routes to publication. This only gets harder when I add the pernicious self-sabotage known as “falling down the rabbit hole.” On good days, I see the story in my head… Read more
Lost voices of democracy

March 17, 2025 In “Youngstown,” Bruce Springsteen’s searing elegy for America’s industrial heartland, an ex-steelworker laments that by shutting the mills, “Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do.” Trump and Musk have now accomplished what Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and several previous generations of dictators never could: silencing the Voice of America. The shutdown… Read more
Five years on

March 5, 2025 So. It’s been five years now. Well. That’s nothing to celebrate. Almost four years ago, some of us, starting with the man then in the White House, celebrated too soon and quickly felt the anvil of another massive surge drop on our heads. That wasn’t the last time. For the immune-compromised, the… Read more
Truth, lies, and distortions

February 26, 2025 You’ve probably heard that the two men who are leading us into God knows what are planning to drop in on Ft. Knox to check on our gold reserves. I’m more worried about another precious asset: words, of which far too many have been twisted, corrupted, and weaponized. It’s natural for meanings… Read more