The fact coming up in the rearview mirror is a shocker, but a goodie: If you don’t surrender, a world of pleasure is waiting to be opened to you. The sweetest returns to effort come after you’ve sweated out liters of life-giving fluid and are on your literal last legs. Then, you burst into the […]

“In marketing you must choose between boredom, shouting and seduction. Which do you want?” — Roy H. Williams “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” — Peter Drucker Building a brand is all about enhancing the name of your retail […]

Today’s fact is rather more martial than usual. It is simple: Combat is mental. It is won or lost through the mind. Whether it is one man fighting the odds, or a hundred armies clashing on a global battlefield, the mind is always paramount. It may seem like it’s the weapons doing the talking, but […]

Stephen King thinks the book is terrific. Then, at the end of Whistle, in the Acknowledgements, Barclay admits that King reviewed a first draft of the book. This pisses me off. All those big-name authors are incestuous, knowing each other, swapping personal emails, chitchatting around the globe with the peers electronically and on the phone. […]

Resurrection Walk is a book that was written by a skilled professional, but lacks a certain spice. It is, all in all, readable, and covers a trial in compact density with ability and panache, but there is too much Mickey Haller and not enough Harry Bosch. Michael Connelly, the author, made his mark with the […]

“My wife wants sex in the back of the car and she wants me to drive.” — Rodney Dangerfield, comedian I’ve never been sure if women have a weaker sex drive than men or merely suppress their sexual activities for a variety of reasons. If men have a love drive — and they do — […]

There’s no point in knowing any language other than English. If you already speak English, you should be dedicating your efforts to expanding your esoteric vocabulary and improving your hardcore writing skills. If you don’t know English, you should learn it ASAP. It’s that important. In high school, I took multiple years of French — […]

In the 1983 movie WarGames, a computer is taught to be skeptical about the winnability of nuclear war by playing an endless succession of tic-tac-toe games. Yet with the advent of anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems, a future nuclear war may be fought — and won — by blocking the enemy missiles from reaching the homeland. […]

The ideal writer is probably a former reporter for a big-city newspaper, like Michael Connelly or Linwood Barclay. Barring that, he is an English teacher like Stephen King was. The ideal writer works and lives with words. He is marinated in them on a daily basis over long periods of time. Words are the medium […]

The Domination of the Draka is a world story set in an alternate reality, and it could have come true. This is Fact #10. Imagine if the Canadians moved from North America to Africa and got mean. I mean, really mean. Slavery, impaled blacks dead on anus-sharpened sticks, lining the roads, whips, chains, the yoke. […]