The neighborhood around Mt. Morris Park

This Do-It-Yourself Wiseguy Kit contains everything you need for recovering from a hard day of dealing with mooks and punks.

Biscotti, espresso, cocoa, and sugared almonds from Italy will soothe the savage beast.

For recreation, the kit contains couple of decks of genuine Vegas casino cards, and a pile of poker chips for a friendly little game.

The green cards are handy Wiseguy "Know Your Vocabulary" Cheatsheets, designed to help you communicate effectively with your crew.

And the guns (white and dark chocolate) are strictly for business

This fundraiser for the local SPCA is an annual December event here in Cincinnati, and one of my favorite days of the holiday season. The dogs, their owners, and all the spectators always have a wonderful time, and everyone (dogs included) adjourns afterwards to neighborhood bars and cafés to warm up and relax. These are a few of the photos I've taken of the parade in recent years.

Golden Santa

Christmas Angel

Kings of Orient

"Shalom!"

I recently learned that several years ago (I learn about most things only several years after they happen), sf/f writer Tobias Buckell posted a blog entry called Author Workspaces with links to a bunch of writers who'd posted pictures of their offices on their own various blogs and websites. For reasons which still elude me, I thought this sounded fun. So here's my office—photographed in my best attempt at a 360-degree presentation.

This office is about 8' x 12', which is a tight squeeze (and leaves far too little room for bookcases). On the other hand, I move a lot, and over the years, I've written most of my books without an office at all. So I'm not complaining.

One thing people often comment on is the framed set of some of my bookcovers hanging directly above my desk, which you can sort of see in the second and third photos. Whenever I'm sitting at my keyboard thinking, "I don't know what I'm doing. This is a mess. I can't write this book," I look up at those covers—which are all published books about which, at some point, while sitting at my keyboard, I thought, "I don't know what I'm doing. This is a mess. I can't write this book." Seeing those covers reminds me that I've gotten through this before, and I can do it again if I just hang in there and keep trying.