Ass Packwards.

You know how people say, “The house could have been burning down and I still wouldn’t have noticed…” Well, I didn’t say it, my friends, I lived it.

Last month, on Saturday, June 2, I spent the afternoon working on my new middle-grade novel and I was in the zone. Deep, deep, deep. Yes, I heard sirens and the whirring blades of the helicopters, but did they register? No. No, they did not.

The fifteen years I spent living in NYC had dulled my senses to those sounds. The fifteen years I spent wri...