Kick your shoes off and make yourselves at home

So, thanks for WordPress “Freshly Pressing” me yesterday, I have an absolute gaggle of new visitors to the site. And that is fantastic! Thank you all so much for visiting, for perusing the website, for commenting on posts and pages . . . . I’m overwhelmed, but in the best possible way.

I wish I had some snacks, a beverage, or some more seating to offer everyone! But you’re all most, most welcome! And with so many people dropping by, I thought I’d offer a casual tour for all you awesome new readers:

First: I’m a writer and a teacher. I’m some other things, too, but when I introduce myself at parties, one or both of those is my first response to “And what do you do?” This blog-turned-website has a lot of info on what I write and how I teach. You might find it easiest to just hit the “Writing” tab and the “Teaching” tab and then pick whatever looks interesting. The “About Me” tab has some fun stuff, too.

I dabble in photography. Not professionally or even all that seriously — I couldn’t tell you much about the gear or the art form, but I enjoy framing shots of interesting things I see, so I do post photos here. Supposed to do it each week, but I’ve been hit-and-miss lately. I’ll be more “hit” from now on, though! (There’s a new one up today, in fact.) So you can check out my Photo blog category in the “category cloud” in the right-hand sidebar.  ===>

While you’re over there in the sidebar, check out some of the links to places I read and people I know. Yes, the list of links is long. But I read a lot of cool stuff and am fortunate enough to know a lot of cool people. So go visit some of my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, or just cool authors who signed a book for me once or awesome magazines I love reading.

Also, this isn’t my only blog: I also love smiley faces and share all the happiness I can find over at my Smile! blog. And if you’re all big reading nerds like I am, you’re probably also a big fan of libraries, which means you must love librarians. So you might like to check out my wife’s excellent website chronicling her research into cinematic portrayals of librarians. That’s over at Reel-Librarians.com.

Anything else you all would like to see here? I love reader feedback (and I’m getting plenty of it already!), so if you’d like to see any new content — blog post series like my 11-11 reading challenge (which I still need to finish) or my tips on researching for fiction, previews of my two main unpublished books (a story collection and a novel), more teaching content, or anything else — let me know in a comment! I’ll see what I can do.