I recently started this blog with an intent to write about, well, blogging, and my novels, and the writing process. Two weeks into the blog, I have more often proposed epitaphs or waxed wise about getting older. Maybe I’ve got a preoccupation with death, previously undetected.

I hope I’m not turning into my father, who was so fixated on death that for decades he kept running tallies of how many friends and acquaintances he had lost in all the groups that mattered to him, including WWII vets, high school alumni, and fellow retirees of his aerospace corporation. Although I wouldn’t resist developing some of his late-in-life eccentricities. After years as a rigidly rational engineer, he became convinced that UFOs are among us and, given a few more healthy years, he might have become a UFO chaser.