Alex Carrick’s Blog

Secrets! Sugar sprinkled on candy or arsenic mixed with nightshade. Are you in the know or flying blind? Delicious seductive power or unpredictable happen-anytime pain. Who to bring into the inner circle? Who best left excluded? Where to extend the intimacy? An implication of purity that’s non-existent. Most secrets aren’t. Obscuring the truth, they rarely […]

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“Real” men know how to make and repair things. They’re even able to improvise. I’m always astonished when one of my friends assembles furniture out of ferns. I’m not feeling as bad about my shortcomings as I used to. Nowadays, most things are so complex that when they break down, the only recourse is to […]

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I went to the dentist’s office this morning. To help foster a personal touch, there’s a notation on my chart that I’m an economist, so she usually begins our sessions by asking me where I think interest rates are headed. This time, however, my body language was such that she skipped the formalities and we […]

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The 19th century writers Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker were among the first great environmentalists. Their creations – Frankenstein’s “monster” and Count Dracula respectively ‒ blazed new trails in preserving scarce resources. In his research and during the operation that led to his triumph, Dr. Frankenstein was careful to use the purest form of electric […]

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I don’t understand how women think. It’s been a mystery to me all my life and I expect it will continue to confound me ‘til the day I die. I had a perfectly reasonable idea for how our family should spend the holidays this year. It was practical, do-able and would have saved us a […]

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“What’s $100,000?” she asked flippantly. “It’s $95,000 more than I’ve got,” was his answer. She was starting to drive him crazy. She had two pre-occupations, money and her research. On neither score, was she in any way practical. They’d been living together in a basement apartment for seven months while attending Queen’s University in Kingston, […]

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“Dinosaur Spots Comet in Sky.” “That’s the headline I’m going with,” said Dilly the crocodile to Tony the T-Rex, as they faced each other across the entranceway to the latter’s luxurious cave. It was the most modern of eras in an alternative universe containing the 88th iteration of “standard” earth where the animals had evolved […]

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“Keep your voice down. I don’t want either of us to get into trouble. There are some things that aren’t talked about up here.” Jebediah Senior and Jebediah Junior were meeting in heaven for the first time since the former’s death thirty-five years earlier in a car crash and the latter’s recent shackles-shedding on account […]

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A father drove his two children, 12-year-old Bud and eight-year-old Betty-Lou, to school every morning. In good weather and bad, mostly in heavy traffic, they motored slowly along the well-established route and talked through many of the major issues of life. “What’s that guy doing, Dad?” asked Bud, sitting in the front seat with his […]

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“Start with a ‘hook’. It can be an exceptional title. Or a nifty idea. Even a joke, as long as it’s original. That’s where I begin. Then embellish it. Work backwards if you have to. And always, always, keep in mind the primary question – will this keep a reader interested?” That was the gist […]

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