That’s the lead from the most recent review of A Roomful of Monkeys posted on Amazon’s web page featuring my book. Along with “playful” from the Kirkus Review, those two words sum up precisely what I was intending to achieve with my first comic novel.   To say I was relieved to see words like those […]

This review reminds me of the admonition from that high school composition teacher of mine who’d admonished me to leave humor for those that can write it. Well, the admonition didn’t stop me then, and it looks like this one won’t stop me now. Still looking for buyers of A Roomful of Monkeys and readers […]

Day 20 Flamencos and staying up late Carol had been hinting at finding a nightclub featuring Flamenco dancing throughout our whole trip. I’d spent the whole trip hoping to avoid just that. I’d had my fill of the art form in Seville during the Feria. It’s a lot of twirling, arm swinging and stomping around with a rose stem in your […]

Days 16-19 Beach Boy   When Carol and I first got together, I had stated unequivocally my opposition to sand, the reality of it, the very concept of it and the grit of it that manages to find itself into every crevice and moving part of my body – especially  and particularly how it winds […]

   We were the underdogs. Eleven years old and younger, with oversized gloves and a still-to-be-developed relationship between a baseball and a bat. All knew the stakes. Win and move on, lose and go home. Would the parents feel it more than their kids?   In the first inning the visitors (us) scored twice and […]

Want to keep me from harping on my new comic novel A Roomful of Monkeys? How about buying it? If that won’t shut me up, nothing will. Visit reidchampagne.com and scroll down to my published “works.” Buy both (An American Walkabout) and save! (Not really. I have no idea how that would even work.) Oh, […]

Days 12–15 Nothing happening and loving every minute   These blogs are written from a daily journal I keep when Carol and I travel. It’s little more than a tick-tock of the day’s activities, no matter how routine. Nothing of what I record is worth a blog itself; the notes are meant to jog the […]

Days 9-11 Meet the Rotarians   The winds had calmed, which meant our day-trip to Cadiz would be by ferry and not by bus. You might remember that Cadiz had been our original planned destination, but thanks to Carol’s monumental screw up, we wound up in Rota, and as Robert Frost said of the road […]

Days 6-8 Paradise extended   Carol and I had been in Rota for exactly four days, during which it rained on all four. On the fifth, the weather broke. We walked Rota’s Beach and streets without umbrellas and sat out on our rooftop terrace, all for the first time. In spite of the sometime sideways […]

Days 3-5 Devon and the Deep Blue Sea   While the weather remained quite unsettled by wind and rain, we were still able to take advantage of the breaks to make a couple of discoveries that would help define our stay in Rota. The first couple though, not so much.   A friend of Carol’s […]