Someday, Jacey Komarov would be free. Free of Arne Slocum, that is. Until then, she’d be repeatedly bruised, scraped, burned, marooned — maybe even killed a few times — all for the unsatisfying reason that Slocum couldn’t stop tinkering.

Like now.

“I’ll get us out of this,” Slocum assured her in his unassuring seventeen-year-old voice. A skinny little geek with wide, brown eyes and wiry hair, he looked like he’d stuck his finger in a power jack. For all Komarov knew, he probably had.

The “this” from which they required removal involved claim jumpers. The sole survey team for a…

J. R. R. Tolkien coined an unusual term: eucatastrophe. Literally, it means “good catastrophe,” and by it he meant a sudden turn of events that changes disaster into victory.

The classic example of the technique is Tolkien’s own resolution to the primary conflict in The Lord of the Rings. Against all odds, Frodo carries Sauron’s ring to the fires of Mt. Doom only to be undone by its evil power. But Gollum ambushes Frodo, seizes the ring, and in his exuberance at regaining his “precious” falls into the fire. Thus the ring is destroyed, and Sauron is defeated.

Frodo fails…

Nice job on the website! I'm looking forward to seeing more there soon.

It’s been a long winter. COVID-19 stayed with us, of course. My job vanished in a puff of government funding cuts. I quickly found a new one, but it took a couple of months to sort out the paperwork, so I only started last week. And I haven’t been writing much.

Ironically, being at home all those months made it harder to find writing time. Now that I’m in an office again, maybe things will revert to something like normal. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed telecommuting. It just didn’t result in more stories. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Fortunately…

Too Tall Tales

As the orange glow of sunset fades into the deep blue of evening, a few campers huddle by a fire and tell stories of wild adventure …

You never know what’s beneath the surface of these high mountain lakes. Those crystalline waters hide things you can’t even guess at.

A couple of years ago, I took my wife Jean and son Carl fishing up at Wildcat Lake. You may know the place. It’s up around seven thousand feet at the base of Mt. James. Even in high summer, nights are cold up there. We weren’t too enthusiastic about leaving our…

Too Tall Tales

As the orange glow of sunset fades into the deep blue of evening, a few campers huddle by a fire and tell stories of wild adventure …

The problem with taking kids camping is they find too many ways to get into trouble. When my son was in the Boy Scouts, I’d occasionally get talked into going on camp-outs with them. I avoided it as much as possible, because I had no desire to spend my weekends herding the rascals, but I couldn’t always say no.

One such time, on an otherwise beautiful, warm, sunny afternoon when I could have…

As the orange glow of sunset fades into the deep blue of evening, a few campers huddle by a fire and tell stories of wild adventure …

This series of stories is inspired by a couple of jokes I encountered while much younger and which have stuck with me over the years. They are the tallest of tall tales, stories that pass beyond the improbable and enter the realm of the ridiculous. They have endings so horrific they’re funny . . . because they can’t be real. …

Too Tall Tales

As the orange glow of sunset fades into the deep blue of evening, a few campers huddle by a fire and tell stories of wild adventure …

I learned the hard way that when bow hunting it pays to bring a gun. Neither my friend Josh nor I thought of that at the time, but then we only planned on bagging a deer. Alas, things don’t always go as planned.

We were moving quietly through a dense wood when we spotted the buck. We took aim and waited as the animal slowly, step by step, moved among the trees. It…