I’m back in my Village of Solitude on the coast of western Sardinia – the place that timely bus service forgot – still shell-shocked and woozy from my trip to Umbria. As I reported previously, my Umbria research trip was gearing up to be an exhausting week of racing after…

Dear gentle, devoted, morbidly curious readers (and everyone who’s reading this because they Googled ‘Paris Hilton’, ‘nubile students’, ‘Swedish virgins’ and/or ‘Caligula’ and found this post),  I’m writing to you from a bed the size of a trampoline, having just returned from soaking in a Jacuzzi, inspired by Caligula (or…

I’ve somehow managed to form a genial relationship with a group of folks that acquire material/reviews/articles for a series of high profile web sites. They are friendly, organized and they pay well and promptly. However, the people they acquire for – I’ll call them the “end-clients” – are scattered, indecisive…

Once again, I find myself gyrating through the Free Crap Dance and my moves, which have never been all that groovy, are looking especially graceless and unrhythmic. I’m leaving for a magazine assignment in less than two weeks to write about a region in a country that shall remain nameless,…

In a few hours I set off on a series of budget planes, trains and automobiles, for nearly 24 hours of sleepless, undignified, butt-pounding travel (keep your tsk-tsking comments to yourself Tim Leffel) to get myself from Iasi, Romania back to my travel writing Apartment of Solitude in an abandoned…

The return to my unintended second home – Iasi, Romania – has been filled with equal parts business-as-usual and unlikely surprises. The overnight train ride from Bucharest to Iasi was pure Romania:  The train was full to bursting.  My compartment was all men.  On that note, why am I always…

I get a lot of polite comments about my writing style. Sometimes people say “insightful”, often they say “accessible”, occasionally they say “Where’d you learn your grammar? The jungles of New Guinea?” But mostly they say I’m funny. I’m perfectly happy with this. Foremost because being funny can excuse one…

So I fired off the latest version of my book proposal to my agent a few days back.  We’re on version 573.62 or something by now, I’ve lost track.  On a side note, I’m starting to realize that the content of the book proposal may very well be more important…

Nothing I can say will beat the picture, so let’s get that out of the way. Geeks, if you’re worth your weight in 10 point broad swords, you should immediately recognize the device on the Pettersen dinning room table. For those of you with recurrent sex lives, I’ll spell it…

Was there a full moon last week?  I don’t mean just one day, I’m talking the whole of last week.  Or maybe there was a once-every-million-years wacky planet alignment?  Did anybody notice if the stars rotated into a formation, forming the words “send Leif stuff, so he has to work…