A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

My current author's photo as it appears on the back cover of Reunion: A Story.  Hi, there, Dear Reader! Welcome to another edition of Bloggin' On, the blog-within-a-blog feature where I don't review anything or inject any politics and just write about life, the Universe, and (almost) everything else. Today is Wednesday, January 15, 2020, and as I start writing this post, it's not quite noon in my small corner of Florida. Presently the temperature outside is 80℉ (26℃) under partly sunny skies. The forecast for the area calls for a high of 82℉ (28℃) and no change in the cloud/sun mix, while the low tonight is expected to reach 63℉ (17℃) under mostly clear conditions. Well, yesterday Juan Carlos Hernandez, the New York-based actor-director who sometimes asks me to write screenplays for his Popcorn Skies Productions company and long-time friend (from our days as drama students at South Miami High), texted me a short update on our new film, Happy Days Are Here Aga...

Cover Design: Paul Smith. Photo Credit: © Lilly Library, Indiana University. © 2006 Simon & Schuster/Free Press On April 18, 1945, a 45-year-old war correspondent named Ernest Taylor Pyle was accompanying Lt. Col. Joseph B. Coolidge, commanding officer of the U.S. Army's 305th Infantry Regiment, part of the 77th Infantry Division, on a jeep with three other officers on the small island known as Ie Shima (now Iejima), off the coast of Okinawa. Pyle, who was better known to his readers and the U.S. service personnel he wrote about in a nationally-syndicated column as "Ernie," had landed ashore with the 77th Division just one day before. As the five men drove to Coolidge's new headquarters in an area that was not yet cleared of Japanese defenders, a lone enemy gunner fired his Nambu machine gun at the jeep, forcing its occupants to take cover in a nearby ditch. "After a moment," writes author James Tobin in Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitn...