My books are packed, and we are headed to the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival in Burnsville today, Friday, September 8. We’re doing one talk at 3 p.m., and signing books at 5 p.m.

Details here. The full schedule is here. Hope to see you there if you’re going…

From Hoboken, NJ, this week comes the sad news that John Amato died at the age of 88 on August 30.

Mr. Amato played an interesting role in my childhood and later life.

He was the Hoboken cheese man!

Here’s the story…

My wife, Denise Kiernan, did a fun interview last week with Eastern Panhandle Talk, the morning talk radio and TV show for WRNR in Martinsburg, WV. It’s a full 30-minute chat, mostly on the topic of The Girls of Atomic City, her 2013 bestselling book.

You can watch the video right here…

When I meet math teachers at schools or conferences, they assume that I am a lifelong math lover since my picture book is about Leonardo of Pisa, namesake of the Fibonacci Sequence. I should come clean. Math teachers, here’s what I’ve been ashamed to confess: When I was a kid, there was no subject I feared more than math.

The Happy Hollisters were a family of crime fighters in a book series I read as a kid. Today I’m talking about them over at SleuthSayers. At first, I wanted to just talk about the Hollisters, but the conversation turned into something deeper…

Struffoli are a delicious Italian treat that we used to enjoy as kids. I wrote this tiny piece back in 2001 for a national food magazine. They paid me for it, but never ran it. No idea why. No explanation why. Freelance journalism is known for this sort of fickle behavior. Editors love things, then hate them. This article was deliberately short, intended for the magazine’s front-of-the-book section. It was supposed to run with a recipe that I provided. The article has never seen the light of day—until now…

I mentioned a while ago that I’ve been getting into watches. It’s a total pandemic hobby; something I dug into when I couldn’t leave the house. I thought I’d march through the trajectory of this insanity in a logical fashion, so you can witness the birth of an obsession.

I need to take you back in time to December 2019, when I had but three watches stowed in a box in my closet…

I’m a person who frequently comes off as absent-minded. THIS IS WHY. At any given moment of the day, I’m thinking to myself:

How can I fix the story I’m working on?

What problem have I created for myself that is going to crop up down the line?

How can it make the characters, the story, the scenes better?

I’ve got two drawers in our office filled with bookmarks. The publishers print ’em up for my wife’s books, so I dutifully mail them to people whenever we send out a book or a bookplate. And if I’m anywhere near the table when Denise does signings, I always slip a bookmark into the reader’s book before they leave the table. Why? Because I hate the damn things, and I can’t wait to get rid of them. Thanks to my efforts, I predict we will finally finish them all by 2063.

Here’s what I think authors should be carrying in their pockets instead…

Among my parents’ personal effects, my brother found the photo I’m sharing today. It depicts me and my first-grade classmate, Michelle, putting on a play in our classroom.

Of all the essays I wrote in elementary school, the one that sticks in my memory is one in which I hilariously describe myself as “puppet crazy”!

How crazy was I? Well, let’s see…