The sky is falling! Literary heroine Henny Penny (or Chicken Little, as she’s known in the USA) was one adept bird at sounding the alarm. Wikipedia classifies her story as a variety of folktale that pokes fun at paranoia and mass hysteria, but sometimes we panic for...

This week, I’m having fun with crisis. I take this unconventional approach because some sort of crisis is looming at all times. Is this your experience, too? Not sure? Let me give you some examples. Literary Crisis We’re a non-television household. For entertainment,...

Hi, I’m Candy Smith. If you’ve read Small-g City by S. D. Matley we’ve already met, at least, as far as what she decided to tell you about me. S. D. (I call her Susan) is super-busy this week. So am I (more about that later), but she twisted my well-toned arm to write...

Have you noticed how sometimes a lot of information on a certain topic comes your way? This week, I’ve been inundated with information about climate change. Part of this is my own fault. I’m working on a new book in the Small-g City series, set in 2025. One of the...

Are you acquainted with the term “batching it”? I associate it with the old west, where there were few single women. Lots of single men out this way (miners, cowboys and the like) had to take care of their own household affairs. In letters written in 1896, my...

You can’t go home again. It’s more than the title of the posthumously published Thomas Wolfe novel or an episode of Battlestar Galactica; it’s a basic truth. Yesterday I returned from a one-week visit to my home town. It’s typical of any small town that was...