The Good Wolf of the North

Do you remember when your English teacher told you about the time Robert Frost wrote this:     Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,     And sorry I could not travel both     And be one traveler, long I stood     And looked down one as far as I could     To where it bent in the undergrowth;  You may have been young and so were more interested in recess and video games and dick jokes. Or, you may have been in high school and able to identify with a line or two. Were the two roads the two colleges you were considering, or the two adolescent boys you were crushing on? Maybe the two cities you might move to after graduation? Could be anything, really, but let's skim to the iconic ending: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Here's where Frost and I diverge. One choice is unlikely to make all the difference. Yes, once in awhile, yes, but most of the time you get to rem...

 It's been a long time since my last blog post, which was about the steps a person might take to self publish a novel. There's a reason for that, and for once it's not my own lack of motivation. Over the last couple of years I've had so many changes in my life, and not altogether good ones, that I am just now getting back to a place of routine. Since the dumpster fire that was 2020, I lost both of my parents, left a long term relationship and moved back to my touchpoint town of Bemidji. Suffice to say these experiences have stalled me, and probably changed me too. I'm reminded of a woman I knew as  teenager, a friend's mom. She had lost a child years before. I remember noticing how nothing rattled her. She didn't get upset by a bunch of rowdy teenagers charging through her house, sometimes breaking things and sometimes smoking pot behind her woodshed. I remember wondering how it was that she would just laugh it all off. My own parents would have grown red an...