Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

I was a lawyer for 10 years, and several of my clients had the misfortune, through no fault of my own, of going to prison. I visited them occasionally.

Keeping a guy in prison costs 50,000 bucks a year. Executing one costs a couple million.

I didn't dare think of the future; the past was still happening.

I grew up in a very small, close-knit, Southern Baptist family, where everything was off-limits. So I couldn't wait to get to college and have some fun. And I did for the first two years. And I regret a lot of it, because my grades were in terrible shape.

The two mistakes that come to mind are people who introduce a flood of characters in the first few pages. Where the reader has to stop and get out a flow chart and has to figure out who is who. And you just can't do that - introduce the first four generations of a character's family in the first chapter. You can introduce four or five characters at the most in the first chapter. Another mistake is to use big words that are not normally used in conversation to try to impress folks with your vocabulary.

Jesus preached more and taught more about helping the poor and the sick and the hungry than he did about heaven and hell. Shouldn't that tell us something?