A Perspective on Disappointment

I lived in France for a long time. Paris was my favorite place to live ever, my second backyard, my second home. I moved back to the U.S. 2 ½ years ago and have slowly been settling into a new business teaching French and writing. I haven’t been back to France for a visit, but wanted to go this year. I wanted to see friends, and  had some research I wanted to do for books. I started planning many months ago. Okay, I wasn’t financially solid enough, but thought I might be, by the time the trip...

The Greatness of Being a Beginner

At times it’s uncomfortable being a beginner. I look at my Italian book and I don’t know how to say anything useful, other than “the dishes are in the kitchen”. Um…where else would they be?

Same thing happens in the pottery studio. I look at the pieces of art made by professionals who use the same studio, and it makes me feel pretty small. I wonder, just how LONG will it take to make something that doesn’t look like an artifact from Pompeii? (post-volcanic eruption, I mean…)

And I won’t get started about fiction-writing. There, the learning curve is so far out, you can’t see the end.

New Places, New Content

A couple of years ago I created this web site because as an aspiring fiction-writer, I knew I needed this thing everyone is talking about…an online presence. Editors and agents wanted to know that if a book was published, there was already a space on the web to nail it up for people to see, and folks potentially interested. That seemed like a pretty good idea, except for one chronic question, what do I put on a fiction writing web site if I haven’t published anything yet? That question...

Fits and Starts

Fits and Starts (or, My Writing Journey) I’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of ten. That’s about how old I was when I decided to one day adopt the pen name “Kyle Hunter”, which is my first and middle name. It just stuck with me all those years (I won’t tell you how many.) Though the name stayed with me consistently, other aspects of my writing dream did not. I wrote my first book at the age of 11, entitled “The Fabulous Adventures of Freddie and Herbie”. It was the story of a turtle and...

Home Again

Home again…some comparisons So, here I am back on USA soil. It surprised a lot of people, including me. Well, not totally, because I gradually had the sense that soon, I’d be ready to return to my own country. It starts as a small niggling emptiness, missing family more, then seeing my place in the world gradually shifting continents. Needless to say my family was ecstatic. We were used to being in different countries, but that was starting to get old, you know, the 18-hour trips to come for...