Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

The Cottage The other day I opened my email ten days late and found the following note from the Judith, the woman from whom we’d rented a cottage at Dewey Beach each year for a decade: This is so hard for me to say - we have decided to stop renting the cottage. For the past two years we have been trying to find a way to continue renting, but with our new schedules and locations, it is proving very difficult to keep up with all the duties and responsibilities required to rent Dewey. I wanted to wait until the end of the season to let everyone know - and give you all plenty of time to look for new places. We’d discovered the cottage at 109 Saulsbury Street when our friend Shirley invited us down for a few days. We fell in love with the house, and Dewey Beach, and Rehoboth. The next year we rented the house the week after Shirley. For years our routine was thus: Shirley would rent the house for 2 weeks in May, we’d rent the week after her, then we’d go down early and Shirley ...

Don’t judge a book by its cover. We’ve had that drilled into us—at least my generation did, and, to a large extent, we believed it—I believed and I still do. At least as far as people go. And dogs—you ever meet a dog who looks mean and you want to step back but then he approaches you gently and licks your hand? Anyway, never judge a book by its cover, unless of course, it is a book . I’ve been thinking about covers a lot lately. It started when we released Vampire Rising , my allegorical Vampire novella. It pays homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula while reinventing the Vampire genre. In the story I tell there were certain elements that helped tell the story—mockingbirds who appear wherever Vampires gather, the iron gates that demarcates the separation between the Vampire state and the human world. And the story is described in grays and purples. So I wanted to include all of those elements that in the cover. The Original Cover When my publisher notified me that they wou...