Raymond E. Feist's Blog

I first saw John Wooden at court side in 1963.  My neighbors had an extra ticket for the L.A. Basketball Classic, an invitational college basketball tourney hosted jointly by USC and UCLA, which at the time shared the L.A. Sports Arena as their home court (until two years later when UCLA opened Pauley Pavilion on campus).

They said, "We're going to see Michigan with Cazzy Russel."  "Who they playing?" I asked. "UCLA."  It was the semi-finals.  As a football honk, I paid scant attention to...

I probably spent more time with my mom than any other person on this planet.  The first nineteen years until I moved out.  Then some years later when I relocated to San Diego I spent six months sleeping on a fold-out in her apartment while I figured out what my next move would be.  She was very patent with a late blooming son.   Later when I returned to college I lost a roommate and she had to quit her job because of health, so we became roommates when I was in my late twenties.  She...

Barbara A. Feist  1916-2010

I probably spent more time with my mom than any other person on this planet.  The first nineteen years until I moved out.  Then some years later when I relocated to San Diego I spent six months sleeping on a fold-out in her apartment while I figured out what my next move would be.  She was very patent with a late blooming son.   Later when I returned to college I lost a roommate and she had to quit her job because of health, so we became roommates when I was in my l...

Last night, about 3 AM, I woke up with heart pounding, a profound

sense of dread filling me up, accompanied by a deep sadness, and sense

of loss.  I'm not given to full blown panic attacks, having had maybe

two or three in sixty years, but this one got close.

It also
reminded me of how I felt when I was caught up in the depths of
clinical depression.  That cost me seven years of my life, a marriage,
and a lot of money.
A short digression into this subject is in
order: clinical depression is the most c

The Why?

It's been over five weeks now since I got the word that I was being played.

I've done what all of us do in those circumstances and reexamined every odd bit of behavior or possible clue in all of our interactions over the previous nine months looking for that one sign I missed.  It's the "if only I had realized this meant that . . . " trope, that somehow I could have been smarter, could have been more protected.

<>I've gone through every stage, from disbelief to heartbreak to anger to rage to</>

So, last I posted, I was wrestling with the somewhat admirable goal of discovering what it was I could learn from all the pain and anger generated by the little liar in my life.  Still working on that.

Here's the thing: writers as you might guess often think a bit differently from the rest of you.  It may be I'm touching on the single most significant difference: the narrative.

<>Narrative as any wannabe writer or first year literary student can tell you is simply a story, a constructed series of ev</>

So, what have we learned today? is often the question.

<>In reflecting on the turmoil created by the little liar, detailed in my last blog here, a couple of realizations came to the fore.  Some people have better instincts than others, especially when reading people.  Now, writers tend to be vain creatures if that isn't already apparent to you.  We fancy ourselves "students of humanly," and to be fair, some of that is true.  Many of us write because we look at weird stuff going on all around us and</>

There is a perception among many that two things happen when you get older.  The first is you're supposed to have learned enough not to make mistakes.  The down side is the other one, that you are so stuck in your ways that you can't change.

I avow both are false.

<>Here's the thing; anyone who's read my regular postings on MySpace and Facebook knows I've been on something of a depressive rant for the last month.  I have toyed with the idea of posting the whole sordid affair for the world to see (an</>