How I Spent New Year’s Abroad

Well… not that much abroad. Over the New Year’s holiday, my wife and I traveled to the resort city of Playa del Carmen, in the southeastern Mexican state of Quintana Roo. We were there for five days with my baby brother, his wife, and their eight-year-old daughter, with New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day […]

10-List: Quotidian Quotes: The Ouroboros 2: Electric Boogaloo (more cannibalized quotes from the Firewater Files)

I’m easily sucked in by clickbait slideshows that showcase quotes from both famous people and people I’ve never heard of. Sometimes, seeing a quote—completely removed from context—makes it seem somehow profound, with deep meaning and emotion. Other times, such a quote just makes you scratch your head and say, “Huh?” The following 10-List are all […]

The Good Place: Season 1 — a review

Here’s how it happened. Sharon, my wife, began watching this series several years ago. Since the series ran from 2016 to 2020, we know—for a fact—that it wasn’t before then. But I’m thinking it was after 2020, and probably after all four seasons were available on one streaming platform or another. I do know that […]

10-List: 2025 Funeral March

The older I get, the more dead people I know. That’s not an original quote but I’m unable to give it proper attribution. If you want to quote it and give me credit, that’s okay. If you want to make everyone believe that it’s an original quote from you, that’s okay, too. Credit gets stolen […]

“Burying the Future,” by Firewater — a short story

Jim Hilliard left the lab early because his head felt wrong—foggy and too loud, like someone’s radio had been tuned between stations. He told himself it was the flu coming on. His crew had been working third shift to minimize the influence of background noise, temperature fluctuations and even vibrations from daytime traffic on their […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #17: Borrowing King’s Toolbox

This is my sneaky little way of dropping a quick review of Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000). King’s book is part memoir, part how-to, and part “holy crap, he survived a drunk driver.” He takes you from his scrappy, dirt-poor childhood to the Carrie grind, then the fame explosion—sprinkled with […]

\m/15-Minute Hellmouth\m/: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 2, Episode 15: “Phases” (airdate: Tuesday, January 27, 1998): Part 3 of 3

30:01 – The End Previously on \m/15-Minute Hellmouth\m/ . . . Part 1 & Part 2 On the night of the full moon, while Buffy Summers and her Watcher, Rupert Giles, are out hunting for the werewolf that terrorized neighborhood pets the previous night, a student named Theresa was walking home in the dark, carrying […]

The Future is Still Being Written (setting out on a new journey after completing the last)

On the day I began writing this sentence—Saturday, December 13, 2025—I finished the rewrites of my speculative fiction novel Arcadia Lake. The manuscript now stands at 426 pages, just over 95,700 words. When I started the rewrites, my goal was to get the book down to 94,000 words. I didn’t quite hit that number, but […]

10-List: Firewater’s Favorite Video Game Franchises

I’m an older gamer. We exist—get over it. I’ve been playing video games since the very beginning—starting in arcades, bars, movie theaters, and the corners of family-owned grocery stores where cabinet games first started popping up. My uncle, who’s three years older than me and got just about everything he ever asked for, had one […]

Serving My Sentence (Or, a brief digression about corporal punishment, negative reinforcement, casual racism and retirement)

I’m a retired man now. Sometimes I feel like I should punish myself the way schoolteachers used to, back in the day. You remember—writing a phrase over and over until you met whatever condition the sentence imposed. A hundred times. A thousand. And now that I think about it, the word sentence in that paragraph […]

The Aluminium Tomato (Happy Anniversary to Me)

The traditional tenth anniversary gift is tin or aluminum, which feels like permission—nay, a mandate—for me to don a pirate hat fashioned from aluminum foil while I spelunk down an internet rabbit hole in search of the exact moment Budweiser swapped tin for aluminum cans. I’m old enough to remember those old cans with the […]

In Defense of the Bean (Me and Balzac and successive cups of coffee)

Honoré de Balzac, the French novelist, is best known for La Comédie humaine, a monumental series about post-Napoleonic life in France. I’ve never read it. Everything I’ve heard makes it sound like the sort of book teachers assigned to prove life was suffering before television. Balzac’s work influenced Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, and Henry James—basically the […]

For All Intensive Porpoises: A Celebration of Glorious Word Blunders

Words are the bricks and mortar of a writer’s trade. I love them. In fact, I believe that written language—whatever the language—is a kind of magic. Our words can travel far into the future, long after we’re gone. We’re still reading The Epic of Gilgamesh, for goodness’ sake. And because I’m a confessed word nerd, […]

For All Mankind: Season 1 — a review

This is another series created by Ronald D. Moore. I should have become an avid Ronald D. Moore fan while I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I became aware of his name as a writer and producer around that time. But, I don’t think I really gave […]

\m/15-Minute Hellmouth\m/: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 2, Episode 15: “Phases” (airdate: Tuesday, January 27, 1998): Part 2 of 3

15:01 – 30:00 Previously on \m/15-Minute Hellmouth\m/ . . . Part 1 & Part 3 Willow Rosenberg is ready for Daniel “Oz” Osbourne to take their relationship to the next step. She’s ready for “smoochies.” Xander Harris is having a lot of feelings about the Willow/Oz romance. None of them good, and most of them […]

Filling the Gaps (Or: a brief digression about Sugarland Express, the Kardashians, Henry David Thoreau, and the Relentless March Toward Mental Clarity)

I recently got around to watching Sugarland Express—Steven Spielberg’s first feature film, released in 1974. Which is to say, I’m a man of action and impeccable timing. It only took me 50 years. I’d recorded it from TCM because, as someone who considers himself a Spielberg fan, I thought, “Well, it’s probably time I finish […]

In the Writers Room (with Firewater) #16: Em Dash Jazz

We either never spent much time talking about em dashes when I was in school, or I just wasn’t listening. I’ve used them while writing over the years—without knowing they had an actual name—but only recently have I fully embraced their power. Some of you may be asking, “What on Earth is an em dash?” […]

“Bad Apples,” by Firewater — a short story

Lottie Hambeck had begun to suspect that her neighbor across the road was what her mother would have called a Bad Apple. Her home sat in what used to be the country, though over the years the land had been carved into large residential lots—two or three acres apiece, each affording plenty of privacy. Thanks […]

10-List: Firewater’s Favorite Rock Albums of the 1970s

We are all a product of our times. I listen to a lot of different styles of music. Of late, I’ve been immersing myself in electronica, trip hop and acid jazz, but the music I listen to most frequently is rock music from the 1970s and ’80s. It was a formative time for most of […]

The Ongoing Unwritten Bucket List: (Or, a brief digression about unfinished business, life experiences, “Write What You Know,” and why I call myself a painter, musician and songwriter as well as a writer)

It turns out I had a bucket list long before I ever heard the term bucket list. I know, I’ve probably talked (maybe too much, but that’s subjective) about the list my forever wife and I made—to visit all fifty US states before we died. We did that one already, and neither of us is […]

\m/15-Minute Hellmouth\m/: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 2, Episode 15: “Phases” (airdate: Tuesday, January 27, 1998): Part 1 of 3

00:00 – 15:00 Part 2 & Part 3 On this day in history . . . The WNBA begins filling the rosters of the Washington Mystics and the Detroit Shock. Also, a construction crane crashes into a Roosevelt Island tram in New York City. Ten people were injured. But . . . on the day […]

Things Learned While Looking Up Other Things: The Master of Useless Information

Sometimes, I accidentally learn things. Some of those sometimes, I actually remember what I’ve learned, even if the knowledge is inconsequential or widely perceived as having little value. This, my friends, is the definition of “trivia.” My wife once told me that I am the Master of Useless Information. I’m thinking about having that title […]

The Firewater Fifty #5: CALIFORNIA

Here I go again, talking about my poor, deprived childhood. Not really. I was taken care of, and I lived to tell the tale. It’s just that my people weren’t the traveling kind. After starting school—kindergarten and first grade—in Puerto Rico, I moved back to South Carolina. And aside from the occasional drive across the […]

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