ThomasLitchford

The other day at Starbucks, I told an elderly couple who asked how old Sean was that he was 9 months old. ‘He’s been out as long as he was in,’ I said. As the words were coming out of my mouth I realized that it wasn’t an appropriate thing to say. They both gave [...]

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Last weekend, I had a preview of life as a work-at-home-dad. Danielle had class from 9 to 4, with an hour lunch break at noon, on Saturday and Sunday.
I’ve been amazed at how time-consuming the routine tasks of ‘infant management’ are. Sean would wake up from his morning nap at around 10, I’d feed him [...]

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New York Magazine has a fun article about the publishing industry’s impending doom. Booksquare disagrees with it. Whom to believe?
Via The Daily Dish.
I go back and forth in my feelings about publishing. That’s a luxury only an unpublished novelist can claim. I want to write/publish a book that will make me tons of money. I [...]

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I wrote a follow-up post about military husbands for the Milspouse blog. The first one—‘Are Male Spouses Really “Doing Fine”?’—got a pretty good response.
What I’m hoping to do is start a conversation about how to better support the military husbands out there. It’s a weird world, especially for those of us who are, and always [...]

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This morning at around ten o’clock, I was feeding Sean while we listened to National Public Radio, as is our custom. During one of their thirty-second news bulletins I heard the announcement that David Foster Wallace had been found dead in his home in California. He had hanged himself.
I was shocked. Danielle had to take [...]

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My new post is up at the Milspouse blog: Are Male Spouses Really ‘Doing Fine’?
I get the sense sometimes that, because military husbands are in the minority, we get ignored. And when we are mentioned, it’s often in a dismissive way. Introductions to books about military spouse stuff offhandedly mention, for example, that the vast [...]

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One of my recent Military Spouse columns has been posted on their website. They changed the final paragraph, but it’s a good change. Click to read Spacially Challenged:
Over the years, I have learned something interesting about myself as a man: I am “spatially challenged.” It’s OK; I’ve accepted it. As a man, I’m [...]

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Aside from a couple of political flare-ups, the weekend went well. My parents arrived late Thursday night after driving all day from Michigan. We ate peach upside-down cake—one of Danielle’s new specialities—and then sipped glasses of Scotch (one rock) while everyone wound down.
Friday, we had a good breakfast at home and then relaxed and played [...]

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Blogging is likely to be quiet for a few days as I visit with my family and friends and try to come to grips with turning 30.

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Sometimes, fiction writers take themselves a little too seriously. I’m guilty of it, no doubt. The result is adjective- and adverb-laden prose that sounds pretty to the inner ear (i.e. in your head, not your actual inner ear) but has no concrete meaning.
Good journalists (and some fiction writers!) are really good at writing accurate, concrete [...]

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