On Being Seen: A Few Thoughts After an Appreciative Review

On Being Seen: A Few Thoughts After an Appreciative Review

Every so often, something happens in a writer’s life that stops you mid-stride—not because it’s loud or dramatic, but because it’s unexpectedly kind. Today brought one of those moments.

A fellow writer and blogger, Paul Schingle, published a review of Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen that left me both grateful and a little stunned. Not because he praised the stories (though of course that’s always nice), but because he understood them. He read them on the wavelength I write on—the quiet frequency where memory, longing, and interior life matter as much as plot.

That kind of recognition is rare. And when it comes from someone who has no obligation to say anything at all, it feels like a small miracle.

What struck me most was how Paul wrote about my characters as if they were people he’d met. Jim, Kelly, and Marty—they weren’t just names on a page to him. They were living presences, shaped by choices, regrets, and the emotional weather of their lives. When a reviewer talks about your characters that way, it means you’ve done the thing every storyteller hopes to do: you’ve made them real enough to walk around in someone else’s imagination.

It also reminded me of something I wrote in my last post about sentimentality and the soft heart I spent years trying to hide. Maybe this is what happens when you finally stop apologizing for the way you feel things. Maybe the stories that come from that place—quiet, nostalgic, emotionally honest—find the readers who are tuned to hear them.

And I’ll admit something else, too: as much as I write for the joy of it, for the characters who won’t leave me alone, and for the memories that still glow in the dark, I would like to earn a bit of acclaim and a decent living from this work someday. Not fame, not fortune—just the kind of recognition that lets you keep doing what you love without constantly checking the bank balance. When someone reads your stories with care and reflects them back with generosity, it feels like a small step in that direction. A reminder that maybe the long hours and the stubborn persistence are leading somewhere.

So thank you, Paul. Not just for the kind words, but for seeing what I was trying to do.

It means more than you know.