-
Chapter Boards
When you write a book, you don’t start out with a first sentence and go merrily along to the closing paragraph, pausing only briefly to correct punctuation. The process is much more involved, creating, altering, and often ultimately rejecting a wide range of characters, chapters, and even entire sections of the book. The manner of…
-
Writer’s Block
We all (as in all who indulge in creative writing) run into it on occasion: an invisible wall oriented somewhere within our brain that deadens the imagination and stops the hands from typing. It can rise up abruptly when you’re trying to figure out the next chapter, the ending of the book, or the ensuing…
-
Kids
Oh, the pains and wonders of parenthood! Yes, from that first tiny wail as they take their first breath to flipping the cord as they complete their graduation from college, children enrapture, engage and enrage us, a very real extension of ourselves that shows the best and the worst we can be. The continuation (and…
-
Gender
A bit of a different note for this blog, a brief examination of the differences in the ways men and women approach the world. What does that have to do with a scribbler, a teller of tales and a creator of fictions, you ask? A lot. Rare indeed is the novel that does not feature…
-
John Blumen
Attentive people will notice that the covers of all nine of my books were done by the same man, John Blumen, a very talented commercial artist and illustrator. And also my oldest friend. John and I met in junior high school, and although we were in the same home room and sat quite literally beside…
-
Flash from the (Far Distant) Past
The Story of Pharaoh’s Mountain Pharaoh’s Mountain is the ninth book in my little library of fiction, and it certainly qualifies as something different: a pre-history and political thriller set at the time of the building of the Great Pyramid of Khufu (circa 2550 BC). Some may well be wondering how the hell did I…