I tell great stories.

In early 2020, I was in my first year of teaching middle school, a job I applied for and accepted out of absolute necessity, and I was miserable. There were times I felt so far out of my element I thought I must be hallucinating the midlife career change. My wife and I tried to…

Over the next few weeks, you’re going to see a lot of promotional material in support of my book release for Astrojuggernaut. I’m very proud of the ROCK STARS series, so I want to make sure it finds as wide as audience as possible. In the old days, publishers financed elaborate promotional efforts including signing…

Publisher’s blurb for Astrojuggernaut: Benevolent aliens have arrived. Who better to serve as the solar system’s cultural ambassadors than its most beloved English rock band? After all, the members of The Force include a cephalopod keyboardist from Proxima Centauri b and an artificially intelligent drummer, so this isn’t their first interaction with nonHuman sentients. Bass…

When we were in Thailand last year, there were times we felt like small children: lost in a world with completely unfamiliar rules and language, slowed by confusion and dependent on the kindness and patience of strangers. Japan wasn’t quite so unfamiliar. We’re hip to a lot of Japanese pop culture in the U.S., from…

We returned to Tokyo Saturday, Nov. 22 and, after checking into Hotel Fukudaya near Shibuya Station, roamed the grounds of the Imperial Palace. The imperial family still lives inside the palace, so that building’s only open to the public for two days a year, and this wasn’t one of them. Our simple, traditional, conveniently located…

There’s an old Japanese adage that says, “In Kyoto, they go bankrupt by overspending on clothing. In Osaka, they do it by overspending on food.” I don’t know if that’s true, but there’s no question Osaka is one of the world’s leading food cities. Author Michael Booth calls it, simply, “the world’s greatest food city.”…

After a pleasant, three-hour ride aboard a Shinkansen bullet train, we encountered one of Kyoto’s most famous hangouts, Nishiki Market, immediately upon exiting Kyoto Station. It’s a tough place to navigate with three bags each. Imagine a shopping mall at Christmastime, only most stores are street-food-style eateries. It’s narrow, overcrowded and an embarrassment of culinary…

Our next leg, an overnighter in the resort town of Hakone, was the one that worried me most. Our first step was to take the subway to Odawara Station on the southwestern outskirts of Tokyo. From there it’s a 38-minute bus ride up a narrow, switchback road to the bus stop corresponding to the hotel…

Shinjuku means “new station” in Japanese, because back near the start of the Edo period — call it the 1630s — it was the site of a new waystation along the Koshu Kaido, a major highway to the nearby capital city of Edo. These days it’s a ward, or administrative neighborhood, of the city of…

As amazing as Tokyo Disney Resort is, it isn’t Japan. It isn’t even Tokyo. And while our plans to visit Japan began years ago as a fantasy about visiting Disney’s Far Eastern fantasyland, our 2024 trip to Thailand left us doubly hungry for an authentic, Asian adventure. Like most Americans, I had some knowledge of…