It's that time of year again! The fam and I trekked into the mountains this summer. Here are 10 highlights and 5 lowlights from this summer's trip: BANFFFFFFFFF: The hype is all true. Magestic, Breathtaking. Restorative. Surreal. Insert a thesaurus worth of positive superlatives here. I did not even mind the waiting and the throngs of tourists. If anything, it made me happy tto share the beauty with them. (Pic with turquoise Peyto Lake below) Glacier National Park: This had the beauty of...

noise, Noise, NOISE! I picture The Grinch in my head as I write that. But I think I feel like him any time my phone dings, or I search YouTube, or I do just about anything, anywhere. My life now seems to be narrated by reels, push notifications, and clickbait. And the headlines, emails, and social media posts have only become more emotional. Something shifted several years ago requiring content to be that much more flashy to get our attention. It's like some sort of emotional inflation...

One of the things I dreaded about writing a book would be having to read it aloud to someone. I had this ridiculous belief that I could get away with just talking about my book. But in the last four year, I've had increasing opportunities to read to others and learned a number of things - mostly about myself. People come to readings for different reasons. Some are coming because they want to hear a work in an author's voice using the pacing, intonation, and tone the book was written in (I've...