About a year ago I converted a novel-length manuscript from first-person narration to third person. It was almost impossible to do it without error. I read through the converted manuscript three times and every time I would find multiple instances … Continue reading
I got up at 3:30 this Thanksgiving morning so I could leave the house by 4:30 to take my wife to the airport. As soon as I entered the arterial from my neighborhood I was passed by a county sheriff’s … Continue reading
The main reason I left teaching psychology is that I couldn’t go on teaching lies. When I analyzed the source of my discontent, I came up with a dim view of my chosen field, a criticism of widely held pre-theoretic … Continue reading
I recently saw, on DVD, Wise Blood, the movie based on a novel by Flannery O’Connor. Criterion has reissued this 1979 gem, all cleaned up, and with annotations and interviews for context. The movie increased my respect for O’Connor. I … Continue reading
I recently participated in an online writing conference offered by Backspace Writers Conference (http://www.backspacewritersconference.com/). Their conferences run four days and include six attendees from all parts of the country. This particular one focused on manuscript submission materials: a query letter … Continue reading
Terrorism used to be a strategy of violence against a civilian population for political or religious expression. A terrorist act was a “statement” by people who otherwise had no voice. It’s hard to imagine groups that literally have no voice … Continue reading
I started my fiction-writing career with mystery, which I chose precisely because it is formulaic. As a beginner, I wanted to be guided by a lot of structure. I never held the delusion that I possessed some towering talent burning to be … Continue reading
The screenplay adaptation of my detective novel came in at 93 minutes. I learned a ton. One lesson was that I am capable of taking an objective view of my own work. I slashed mercilessly. Several beloved secondary characters were … Continue reading
This book falls into in the category of magical realism by most accounts, but I didn’t see a lot of that, especially compared to Marquez or Rushdie, for example. Instead, the stories told are better characterized as fantastic, amazing, improbable, … Continue reading
I am still dazed from a weekend-long sci-fi / fantasy conference, Tuscon 42. The name of it looks like a misspelling of Tucson, but it isn’t. It’s supposed to mean something like TUS (the airport designation) + CONference, hence Tuscon. Cute, … Continue reading