An insanely huge honorarium for a 2018 Joe Biden speech at a Connecticut college was a back-of-the-paper item last week in both the Hartford Courant and the Connecticut Post. Both newspapers missed what I thought the key element: Had someone found a way to make a tax-deductible campaign contribution?
Two decades ago, with a bully pulpit of my own and the resources that went with it, I’d have happily chased it down myself. Instead, I wrote to a couple of next-generation journalistic pals suggesting they take a closer look.
Hearing nothing, I grew impatient, and decided to get the idea out for everyone to think about. 
My letter to the editor (the shortest thing I’ve ever had on that page!) is in the July 16 Courant. Read it ==>>here:
The inevitable entropy of Alzheimer’s
Writers are urged to draw on their own experience, to incorporate ideas and events they know well.
Easy to say, but I still find it difficult to work Alzheimer’s into my writing. Nonetheless, I’ve been going through notes I made through those hard years, and managed to put together a piece remembering my dear Brad’s gradually diminishing ability to go anywhere by herself.
The editors of American Writer’s Review 2019 liked it. It’s out now, a thick anthology, and is available at booksellers including Amazon –$15(!!) in paperback, $2.99 as a Kindle book — or you can read it ==>here
The evolution of a naughty boy’s nana
It’s fun sometimes to look back at how an idea germinates and — often too slowly — blossoms into a story. The seed of “Méchant” was an overactive little boy playing with a toy car while his overworked mother waited (with me and others) to see an orthopedic doctor at UConn Health Center. I imagined another patient volunteering to help with the little boy, and drafted a pretty good description of the setting. I tried calling it “Naughty Boy” and then “Novice Nana,” but it stubbornly refused to grow into a story with a narrative arc.
I set it aside, but came back to it with the notion of developing the novice nana into a frustrated woman who wished she had children of her own. From the start I’d given her enough French fluency to think of the little boy as méchant. I dimly remembered — had to look up — a more nuanced alternate meaning, not just naughty but wicked.
The theme for the next edition of Nightingale & Sparrow was renaissance, and I now had the novice nana entertaining wicked thoughts of her own rebirth. Perfect fit. Out now, available at Amazon with a bunch of other good short stories, or here at my blog
What’s Wanted? Less is More!
I was at Hartford’s downtown bus station one evening two years ago, watching people while waiting to greet an arriving friend. I began exploring phrases to capture the chalky light and anomie of people coming and going but isolated from one another. By the time I got home, the idea of placing a runaway in that setting had formed.
The resulting story has been offered here and there, and gotten a few favorable comments but no takers. One editor suggested that the ending felt rushed, and might be improved by reworking at more length.
Ironic, because a month ago I learned of two literary magazines looking for short-shorts (under 1,000 words) and for themes that might fit this story. I found it easier than expected to trim it from 1,220 words to 995 – and whammo, in two weeks it was accepted by an online magazine named “Who Writes Short Shorts?”
Read it here
A Jamaican windfall
I have to confess that I almost wrote “Windfall” as a first-person non-fiction piece, a kind of chapter that might have been added to my Jamaican memoir.
But precisely because the incident and its aftermath are real, and all but one of the characters are still living, I decided to make it into a short story, and add a closing twist entirely different from my own experience.
I think it’s still a gripping story. The editor 
of the Lowestoft Chronicle had earlier printed “Monseigneur,” my account of my first nights in Phnom Penh. He liked this one, too, and it’s now available online at ==>http://lowestoftchronicle.com/issues/issue37/donnoel/
Elizabeth “Brad” Noel, 1930-2019
I was at her side when my beloved wife of 65 years died at 2:30 this morning. It is a huge loss, 
but a blessing for her: the final months with complications of Alzheimer’s were an increasing burden on her despite the best efforts of the caregiving staff of Seabury and the McLean hospice service.
Her obituary can only hint at the wonderful life we had together; read it ==> here.
Mama’s treasures online
Part of downsizing, on my way to selling the house and moving to Seabury, 
was selling or giving away clothes. An ad for what seemed a high-fashion consignment shop on the Berlin Turnpike caught my eye. Emily and I took a bunch of Brad’s things one morning—which proved the inspiration for a short story that’s now out in Every Pigeon magazine, readable online ==>>here
Back to Jamaican Roosters
In my 2007 memoir Near A Far Sea, I mentioned the neighbor whose roosters
became such a nuisance that I began buying them to get rid of them — which proved a fruitless and endless project. I’ve embellished the account a bit, and it’s just published in the December 2018 issue of Spitfire, a new literary magazine. You can read it (and other stories, fiction and otherwise) ==>here
Moved by an escalator
We were coming home from vacation, upbound on an airport escalator, when we saw old friends
coming down. We hollered, waved, and got together for a ten-minute reunion before going on to our respective flights.
That chance meeting came to mind when Pilcrow & Dagger (a Georgia literary magazine that’s accepted another of my short stories) invited submissions on the theme “Do you remember?”
The resulting story, as so often, is complete fiction beyond that initial escalator encounter. It’s in the December issue, available December 7 at Amazon, but available now online and ==>>right here
Finding a way to a painful subject
I’ve tried for several years to write about Alzheimer’s disease, without success. Too painful, I suppose. A writer is supposed to work his life experience into his work, but I haven’t until a few months ago been able to do so.
Then Zimbell House, a publisher of short story anthologies that’s taken several of my
earlier works, invited stories that developed a strong sense of community in a town that should be named November Falls. Place it anywhere, in any time, but make the community one that readers could readily identify and empathize with.
earlier works, invited stories that developed a strong sense of community in a town that should be named November Falls. Place it anywhere, in any time, but make the community one that readers could readily identify and empathize with. As I toyed with the idea, I decided my fictional town ought to be upstream from some very real towns on the little rivers that flow out of the Adirondacks and become the Hudson — but a town time had passed by, a frail shadow of its former self. It wasn’t then a big step to make the protagonist a man visiting his mother, resident of a cruelly named “memory care unit,” whose life story matched the town’s.
It worked; Zimbell editors liked it. It’s out now in bookstores and online, a compilation of nine authors’ imaginings of a town called — like the book — November Falls. You can read all nine in paperback or as an e-book, or read my version ==>> here
