“How to keep a daily writing practice” is a common theme among writing advice columns, articles, and books. I know, because I’ve read most of them. It’s been a dream of mine for decades to have a daily writing habit.

For the last ten months, I’ve written for an hour almost every weekday. I’m not going to lie. I’m just about as proud of this as anything I’ve ever done.

As the practice has solidified, I’ve tried to measure the advice that I’ve read throughout the years in an effort to see what actually helped. Mostly, though, I found that the advice was no help whatsoever. Continue reading →

I do not consider myself an ostentatious man. In public, I am conservative in dress and speech. I drive a minivan. I bathe regularly. But sometimes, something good happens in my life that I must declare from the mountaintop. Such a thing happened yesterday, when I successfully activated my replacement phone.

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Costco cart in hand on a Sunday afternoon, it all came back to me. I furrowed my brow, drew my children close, and prepared for battle. The unhappy cavalry of shoppers and pale-faced, run-walking employees closed in on us. Only a dozen feet away from the membership desk, I remembered what I had tucked away in my memory the last time we let our Costco membership lapse.

In my mind, Costco has always walked a fine line between rampant big-box consumerism and bulk-buying convenience. It would be easy— and perhaps not unjustified— to view these mega-warehouses as unsightly blights on the suburban landscape, threatening to kill off any Mom and Pop survivors of Walmart. Continue reading →