David Klein's Blog, page 8

Song for the Next Unknown

A while ago I wrote lyrics for a friend of mine who’s a singer-songwriter and I’m back at it. The timing is right because I’ve become interested in the most rudimentary element of poetry and lyrics: rhyming schemes. I’ve been spending way too much time playing with language and experimenting with rhyming patterns and how […]

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Dear Mary:

Dear Mary: I’ve decided to finally respond to your emails not because I remember you, but because I don’t. When you first contacted me after my name and face appeared in the media following the plane crash, I had no recall of you. After you sent a second email with your photo attached posing in […]

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Portnoy Would Like to File a Complaint

I’ve been reading novels from the past that I believe could never be published today due to potential cultural appropriation, offensiveness, misogynistic themes, lack of political correctness, or some other enlightened objection that has diluted the variety and depth of what major publishing houses are bringing to the market and serves as a supply side-form […]

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Resolutions are Out–Intentions are In!

We’re gathering with friends to ring in the New Year, and with every person I corner into a conversation I bring up the topic of New Year’s Resolutions. You can learn a lot about someone when you ask if they have resolutions. I hear some of the standard popular resolutions: getting more fit, being more […]

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2024 Wrap

We all read listicles—”The Top Ten This” and “The Eight Ways to Do That.” It’s a popular format in this era of short attention spans. But I have a tip for readers to make listicles even faster and easier to read: skip all the introductory text (such as this paragraph) and go right to the […]

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Villanelle #1: Don’t You Ever Get The Blues

I’ve recently paid attention to the sonnet form of poetry, and even wrote a modest entry of my own. Now I’ve been studying the villanelle. Like a sonnet, a villanelle follows a defined structural form, and therein lies my interest, which is why I’ve been drawn to Pecha Kucha. As a novelist, I have a […]

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Gifts for the Readers on Your List

Wondering what to give to that smart and curious person on your holiday gift list? Try one of these gripping novels: IN FLIGHT A business executive and family man survives a plane crash but suffers a rare dissociative fugue, disappearing for several days until he is found and must put his life back together. Reviewers […]

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Crows Hold Grudges — Do You?

Do you hold grudges? Crows do. They have a keen intelligence on the level of chimpanzees and can identify and remember faces—and remember wrongs. I recently read a feature about crows and the people tormented by them (New York Times). One of the victims was Gene Carter, from Seattle, who once waved a rake in […]

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Sonnet #1

Although my lifelong writing love is the novel, I’m exploring other forms in my dotage. Like my love for Pecha Kucha, where you write and recite a story that takes exactly 6:40 seconds to tell, using 20 slides that each stay on the screen for 20 seconds. Three times I’ve performed that dog and pony […]

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Stairway to Heaven

I had two encounters yesterday—random occurrences but related thematically. In the morning, I pulled into the parking lot at the auto parts store where I’d gone to get a new battery installed in my vehicle. As I approached the entrance, a man came out of the store and approached me. He apologized for bothering me […]

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