I have a pleasant chore ahead of me: naming the main character in my new novel, the third in the trilogy that started with A FALSE DAWN. She’s a young Native American woman living among wealthy French-American whites who have adopted her in St. Louis in the early 1800s....

I feel as if I have lived a sheltered life. Certainly as a kid, and even as a man now in his 70s, I don’t interact a lot with people. If I do, it’s in a guarded, even formal way. I have good “party manners,” but I don’t have...

I recently got a brainstorm for a third novel in the series that begins with A FALSE DAWN. I need a new project to get me through the winter. More important, I like the idea of continuing the series with new characters because I have a theme I need...

I’ve written on this site, many times I believe, that you cannot control how readers react to your work. All you can do is tell a story that really excites you and do your best to get it “out there,” whether through social media or library lectures (which I...

I had a terrific idea last week for a third novel in my series about Louise and her family. I was reading this book on the history of St. Louis, which is where the second novel ends. Suddenly all these ideas for plots and characters came cascading into my...

Riffing on a theme. Starting at one point that seems promising and then soaring off in any direction you feel like going. Spending time writing a conversation between two characters that you will probably never use in a finished novel, but doing it anyway because you’re enjoying the process...

A friend who recently read my novel, A FALSE DAWN, told me it reminded her of a “black and white movie, not in content but in feeling.” I thought that was a wonderful comment on my book because that’s the feeling I was trying to get across: a story...

It’s time to salute those who may or may not get mentioned in the “acknowlegements” section of a novel: all those people who helped the author get the work done. When I was younger, I used to avoid feedback, or grimace my way through it when I was forced...

It’s been a revelation for me, how much the world of A FALSE DAWN, my first novel, replicates the world I grew up in. Without realizing it, I was writing about what I know. I didn’t think so at first; after all, the novel concerns a French-Canadian woman living...

Many people who read my novel, A FALSE DAWN, have asked me, “Why did you pick this character and this topic: A woman in the 1740s? Living in the middle of a war you, Jeff, never lived through?” Much as readers might enjoy the book, they often can’t help...