Hello

I started writing when I was young, although back then it was poetry. I began winning poetry contests in fourth grade and kept writing for years. Then I grew up, joined the Navy, and life became considerably better at finding things for me to do with my time. I didn’t write as much, but I never stopped reading. I owned an unreasonable number of books. Fortunately, I married another reader—and another author—who had an unreasonable number of his own. When we combined households, we had more than a roomful of books, with shelving arranged like a library. We could probably have given a small community library some serious competition.

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Eventually, I started writing again while working at my most recent job. At first it was nonfiction, and then children’s books. One of those children’s books began with a sentence I carried around in my head for more than a decade. My oldest grandson was about four, and his mother and I were getting him ready for preschool. He had a stuffed hippopotamus he wanted to take in his backpack. As we gathered everything together, he looked at us very seriously and said, “Please don’t crush my hippo.” That was it. The sentence lodged itself in my brain and refused to leave. By the time he was seventeen or eighteen, I finally made the book I had been imagining all those years about the hippo in the backpack. I hope to publish it someday. It exists for no particularly sensible reason except that a four-year-old said something adorable and my brain apparently considered that a long-term assignment.

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My humor tends to be dry, and one of my favorite actors of all time is Gracie Allen. She had a wonderful ability to take an ordinary situation, turn it completely sideways, and deliver the result as though she couldn’t imagine why anyone thought it was funny. I’ve spent years practicing that particular skill. Sometimes I’ll say something in that same perfectly serious way and people don’t realize I’m joking. They just think I’m strange. They may have a point, but I prefer to think I’m honoring Gracie.

That eventually led to Tidepool Musings, where I write about whatever happens to tickle my fancy, annoy me, puzzle me, or refuse to leave my head. I don’t have a huge audience, and that’s fine. I’m writing because I enjoy it. If somebody else wants to ride the waves with me, they’re welcome.

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These days, some of those odd observations have become books. The first ones to make it into print grew naturally out of the blog: everyday life, peculiar situations, and the ridiculous things human beings do without apparently noticing how ridiculous they are. The more serious stories take longer. They’re still sloshing through the sand. Eventually they will become pearls. That's the goal, anyway.