I'm happy to announce that You Are Here won first place (mainstream fiction category) in the 21st Annual Writer's Digest Book Awards. When they contacted me last Friday to tell me I'd won, I waited all weekend for them to write me to say they'd made a mistake....
I've always hated hearing my recorded voice talk back to me. So I haven't listened to my latest radio interview, in which I talk about myself, my life as a writer, and some of the ideas that went into "You Are Here." Click the link below to download the interview;...
I haven't been blogging much on the website lately because I've been working hard on my latest novel as well as contributing blogs on gay issues at the Huffington Post. But if you happen to stumble on this page and wish to check out my contributions to HuffPo, the...
I started taking yoga classes in the late summer of 2009, a few weeks before my 41st birthday. I had just recovered from a debilitating back spasm and was determined to strengthen myself against future back spasms. More than three years later, I've become addicted...
As the ship crept along the Beagle Channel on the approach to “Glacier Alley,” I realized only then that I didn’t know what a glacier looked like. I guess I was expecting something that looked like one of the ice cubes from my freezer, only larger and dirtier. But...
At around six-thirty the next morning I woke up to the pitching and the creaking of the ship. We parted our stateroom curtains to reveal a dark, greenish-brownish mass of rock slide past us. Right on schedule, the ship was creeping toward the southernmost part of...
Thanks to the rearranged travel schedule, the ship slid into the dock at Ushuaia – the most southernmost city in the world -- several hours earlier than planned. This gave us plenty of time to explore the town as well as take a too-brief land tour of Tierra Del Fuego...
Sailing south of Puerto Madryn, we were supposed to turn into the Strait of Magellan for a day of scenic cruising and then dock in Punto Arenas, in Chile. But high waves and gale-force winds compelled the captain to deliver the bad news that the ship...
Two days later our ship docked early on a cold and windy morning in Puerto Madryn, Argentina, about 825 miles (1,330 kilometers) southeast of Buenos Aires. From there we took a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride across the empty Patagonian plains to one of our most...
One of the many illusions -- perhaps the biggest illusion -- that a cruise offers is the constantly available food. We'd wake up in the morning, walk up a short flight of stairs, and there the food was waiting for us, ready to be put on our plates by smiling...
