I’ve been a skier since the age of three, so it’s frustrating to sit inside and watch a blizzard here in the flatlands of the Chesapeake Bay, rather than being out on the slopes or the trails. But, a 25-inch dump is good reason to do some serious writing. I am working on my second…

The best thing about going on a big-ship cruise is the opportunity to read books, uninterrupted by phones, e-mails, or pressures of deadlines. We returned yesterday from such a cruise on board the “Carnival Pride” — from Baltimore to Port Canaveral to Nassau to Freeport and back to Baltimore. The first day out in the North…

A couple of weeks ago at a meeting of writers, a novelist whom I had just met told me that she was “impressed by all the things you’ve done in your life.” She had read my bio on my web site and was reacting to the fact that I’ve gone through five distinct phases of…

Last night, I attended a meeting of the Annapolis chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Association. We meet monthly at a coffeeshop in a part of town which calls itself “The Maritime Republic of Eastport.” Last night’s affair was a book fair, whereby exhibiting members sold their respective books to other members. As I browsed through…

For us, Thanksgiving weekend marks the end of the boating season. For nearly 30 years, we raced sailboats on the Chesapeake Bay. Every year, we prepared our boat for haul-out immediately after the Thursday holiday, and she would go “on the dry” on Monday. Sailboat racing had been a family sport for us. Sue and I…

Soon after the overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s communist regime in November 1989, I reunited with my closest boyhood friend, Vladimír “Vlád̛a” Svoboda. I had left him behind when my parents and I escaped from the country in 1948, and both of us were twelve years old. Now we were in our mid-fifties, and we had travelled…

This blog becomes part of my writer’s web site — https://charlesoheller.com/ — which I have just created and which goes live today. I call myself a “writer,” despite the fact that I’ve spent the majority of my professional life (translated “my day jobs”) as, first, an engineer, and then a university professor, a software entrepreneur,…