My first published piece of fiction was a huge mistake and almost ruined my writing career before it started. Nevertheless, it was a valuable lesson that took me years to understand and internalize in a way that made me a better person. Also, I’m sti...

This is a very special Mickey Picayune in that I’m mostly sharing a giveaway for books at the end of this email. I have a shorter-than-usual story because my brain hurts at the moment and I need to give it some rest. Why does my brain hurt? A month a...

On my seventh birthday, right after second grade, I asked for a guitar as my gift. My mom took me to the music store at the end of our street and let me pick it out. She also signed me up for lessons. It was great. I didn’t do anything with it that f...

I’m really torn about the Christmas season. I like receiving gifts, but I don’t like shopping, so I’m not great at giving. I like watching a lot of Christmas movies, but there’s a lot of absolute drek that gets passed off as holiday themed, but is ju...

So we travelled this past week to celebrate Thanksgiving with family. I hope you had the chance to do the same and, if you couldn’t, I hope you enjoyed the heck out of being able to eat a meal on your own schedule and watch whatever you wanted on tel...

I’ve been at this writing business quite a while, stretching back to typewriters, carbon copies, and self-addressed stamped envelopes for the return of manuscripts. I subscribed to about a dozen literary journals, and spent every evening reading, or...

I’m fully into the leaf-gathering phase of the year. I wish it were a harvest, meaning that the leaves had some value as food, or could be processed into a fibrous wonder material like hemp, or, best of all, transmogrified into gold. Alas, they are t...

I became obsessed with magic tricks when I was ten years old. This was back in 1974 and the only magicians I’d seen at that point were cartoon versions in Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons, and their ilk. It’s not like my parents took us to vaudeville sh...

The past few weeks I’ve been dealing with our apple crop. You wouldn’t think a humble house in the suburbs would also be a burgeoning apple orchard, but my wife has vision. “I’ll just plant a few trees,” she said. At first, I was only annoyed because...

My day was blown up right after work when I noticed a guy struggling to start his pickup truck. I had just finished my day job and was plotting my evening: write this newsletter, write my novel, play with the dogs, and exercise. I’d have time later o...