I don’t think I’ve had a real up close mentor, mostly because I’ve been too over-awed by the ones I admire and too shy to ask for help. But I’ve watched a lot of writers from a distance and learned from them. Also I live in an out-of-the-way village about 70 miles...
Is there anything in life that doesn’t require multi-tasking skills of some sort or another? At any stage in life? Employers want workers who can juggle. Husbands, children, lovers, and readers expect you to be able to swivel from one thing to another. If readers like...
Today I am hosting my friend Marilyn Meredith. She is sharing news of her new book, A Cold Death. Be sure to read to the end of this post to enter Marilyn’s contest. When you’ve written as many books as I have, I’m always looking for a new and unusual way for my...
So I got an invitation to sign books more than one hundred miles away, and a two-and-a-half-hour drive from my mountain top village to coastal California. Specifically, Santa Maria. A bookstore called Bookworm. The trip offers an eyeful of glorious California scenery....
The best writing advice I ever got was watching the agony of a writer who couldn’t bring himself to write The End. As a result, he never finished anything and still remains in the ranks of the wannabes. Oh, he had a million excuses, and at some point, we’ve all used...
I adapted a short story I wrote long ago for three characters. We have two little theater companies in our mountain village in Central California. I went to a first reading a couple of years ago intending to volunteer as stage manager and found myself in a lead role...
I thought everyone could write if they just sat down and put their mind to it. As my facility for words came easily to me, I never thought it was important. A facility for manipulating numbers was of consequence, after all, because I spent more than a score of years...
No one can proofread their own work with any competence. The mind is tricky, inserting words that don’t lie on the printed page. Ever tried to read those garbled words/passages that show up on Facebook? As long as the first and last letters of the word are correct,...
Really good books are about a lot of things, some of them heavy social issues. Raymond Chandler’s novels are about crime and corruption in the 1940s in a place he called Bay City, in truth, Santa Monica. Myy first novel, No Dice, published in 2010, is about crime and...
I write police procedurals in the whodunit genre. I like the cerebral quality of following the detective in an investigation. With a thriller you know soon who the evil villain is and his big stakes plan to take over the world. Then it’s all a race against the clock...
