Periscope Depth

2011: the year in review

The astronomer raised his head from the eyepiece of his giant telescope and rubbed his eyes. He had checked all his figures and couldn’t escape the obvious conclusion. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth,” he said. Picking up the phone, he called 911. “An asteroid is going to hit the Earth!” he said. [...]

all my life I’ve been searching for something

I have a new unit of measurement called the “caseyanthony.” It is the minimum amount of media saturation required for me to be informed about something that I have no interest in. I will click on just about every link I find on Breaking Bad, predator drones, Gene Wolfe or top shelf whiskey. Marginal developments [...]

prefix menu

Seen outside a restaurant in Somerville, MA that should really know better.

everyone will leave at exactly the same time

Morning all! Taking advantage of WordPress’s post-scheduling feature to leave you this note. By the time you read this, I will no longer be present on this Earth. Unbeknownst to you, I took a half day on Friday and got myself saved in advance of the Rapture. So now I’m kicking it in Heaven along [...]

when you reach the part where the heartache’s gone

Someone put a leash on the journalism majors at Boston Magazine: CHATHAM BARS INN If Fitzgerald had created Jay Gatsby today, he might have installed his protagonist at the Chatham Bars Inn. The 1914 hotel’s foyer alone, with its polished floors and columns, is irreproachably classy. Because if I run a B&B on Cape Cod, [...]

turn on the bright lights

How to Change the Brake Lights on Your Sedan: Google “how to change brake lights [make] [model]“. Read a few contradictory articles on eHow. Head out to your car with an adjustable wrench, screwdriver and a pair of brake light bulbs. Pop the trunk. Unfold the interior panel on the side with the expired bulb. [...]

the world weighs on my shoulders, but what am I to do?

On Friday, I came downstairs from my desk to get a seltzer water from the fridge. I noticed three cans of seltzer lying in the crevice between our two refrigerators. Since this isn’t the usual place to store water, my mind reeled. I looked up above the fridge, where twelve-packs of soda are kept. Within [...]

you should hear how she talks about you

Today I discovered that, if you feed every sentence in a David Brooks column into Excel and use OFFSET() and RANDBETWEEN() to rearrange them at random, the resulting paragraphs make just as much sense. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little [...]

an empty bottle; I feel a bit free

There’s nothing quite like going downstairs to swap out your laundry, realizing someone has piled your (wet) load on top of a dryer, peeking behind the dryer to see if anything’s fallen back there and spotting a pair of your underwear, going back upstairs to fetch a broken hanger out of your closet (which most [...]

our great computers fill our hallowed halls

Per Scott Kaufman, here’s John Scalzi reproducing Atlas Shrugged as a 1000-word short story, if John Galt were an animated vat of yogurt: A week later, during breakfast, the yogurt used the granola she had mixed with it to spell out the message WE HAVE SOLVED FUSION. TAKE US TO YOUR LEADERS. The yogurt was [...]

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  • Periscope Depth

    The website of John Perich, author of TOO CLOSE TO MISS and editor for Overthinking It. He's learning about writing, marketing, publishing and promotion, and he encourages you to learn along with him.

    perich@periscopedepth.com

  • TOO CLOSE TO MISS




    "... opens with a bang and never relents ..."
    "... from chapter one, I couldn't put the damn thing down ..."
    "... already looking forward to Perich's next book ..."

    Mara Cunningham knew that sleeping with a married man was a bad idea. But when her lover shows up in the hospital after his wife and son are murdered, the rumors about her turn dangerous. Now she's the prime suspect in a double homicide, and the real killers will stop at nothing to silence her ...

    Buy the book that readers are calling "a great, suspenseful thriller" at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers.



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