Trails need to be reconstructed. Please avoid building trails that go uphill.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective employees be honest and hardworking. It has even stopped hoping for employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference between the men's room and the women's room without having little pictures on the doors.

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

Men have no cause to criticize women about the way they are about weddings. Because men are like that about sports, but it never ends. At least women, after the wedding, say it wasn't that big a deal and they're never going to look at the DVD again. Men never stop being crazy about sports.

I never start a section of the story without knowing how it will end. I also consciously try to shape the story as though it were a movie.

If the security personnel do their job properly, they just might cause you to miss your plane, thereby possibly saving your life.