From the Hillbilly MFA: Voice is hard to define but you know when you hear it. In Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, I heard it.

From the Hillbilly MFA: Writing experts say flashbacks kill tension. Lauren Groff spent much of a novel proving them wrong. The reasons she pulled it off are worth emulating.

Six months ago I found a Bald-Faced Hornet nest in the woods and kept quiet about a second one over the chicken coop — didn't want to jinx it. Well. They made it.

A juvenile bear kept visiting the chicken coop. I had two options: sit in the dark with an air horn waiting for a bear that might never show, or find a remote solution. I like sleep. So I rigged a tripwire.

October on the Ridge means changing colors, mild weather, and bears getting fat before winter. We've got a 400+ pound regular making his rounds. We've also got a juvenile with an unhealthy interest in the chicken coop — and my coffee.

We've been trying to grow lion's mane mushrooms on the Ridge for years. Multiple totems on two different properties going back six years. Then, after almost 18 months of waiting and trying not to obsess, they arrived. Worth it.

Baby chickens!!!

Don’t count your hornets before they hatch…

I came across a strange little nest in the woods and fell down a rabbit hole learning about Bald-Faced Hornets. Turns out their queen's life is a three-act tragedy that plays out in under twelve months.

Turns out a loaded honeybee and a max gross weight Chinook have more in common than you'd think — and the rookie mistakes are exactly the same.

Every spring, a small colony of Lady Slipper orchids blooms in a grove of pines near our driveway — pink and fleeting, gone in two weeks. What I didn't know when we moved here is that they share the grove with the ruins of an old moonshine still.

The Ridge has its own checklist for spring. First the Lenten roses, stubborn and early, then the daffodils exploding yellow against the brown. Then trillium, bloodroot, wisteria. And somewhere in there — snakes.

After Spirit Mission, I dove headlong into a sci-fi series and made every possible mistake. No plan, no structure, threw everything in, called it a trilogy because trilogies are cool. Here's what went wrong — and why I rewrote the whole thing.

Over a hundred narrator auditions. Cocktails on the porch. A girls' weekend that turned into a casting session. The tedious middle. Here's what making the Duty's Cost audiobook actually looked like.

This book is based on the experiences of an army buddy of mine. He stayed in after I got out, enduring two decades of conflict. The stories he told me over whiskies, at Army-Navy games, and during weekends with our wives fascinated and humbled me. This is how it became a novel.

We have a motto up here on the ridge: no assholes and no drama. Some of chickens didn't get the memo at first. This is the story of Amelia, our sweetest girl, and how a flock turned on her — and what it took to bring her home. And Bertha.

I miss flying every day. But the funny thing is that now, in my fifties, what I miss most is all the stuff I hated about it in my twenties. The studying. The planning. The tedium. Turns out that's exactly what made it worth doing.

I started writing what would become Spirit Mission in the summer of 1991. It took 25 years, a dot matrix printer, a fat lazy cow of a first draft, and one hell of an agent to get it published. Here's how it happened.