I’m doing a lot of yardwork and gardening in this stay at home summer. It makes me think about my writing. My first novel felt like a piece of heavy construction work. BAM BAM WHAP WHAP. Get the foundation in place. Shore it up here. Fix the leak there....

I made a factual error or two in my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, but when readers notified me about this (they love to find mistakes), readers weren’t upset because the errors I made seemed so minor to them. But in my new novel, I’ve tried to be extra...

I’m starting to understand why writers like working on series with the same characters, rather than new characters and settings with each book. Working on SUNRISING, the sequel to my first novel, I’m discovering connections among the characters that I had not explored in the first book. Those connections...

A recent editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested that instead of just removing statues of people like former Mayor Frank Rizzo, we should place these statues in public gardens and museums, along with signs explaining why they were taken down from their former sites. That sounds like a real...

Faulkner said it: The past is never past. We’ve seen so much evidence of this truth in the past few weeks. Statues of Confederate leaders coming down. Centuries of oppression acknowledged and protested against. Some people think, “History? Why study history? Why even care? I mean, history is so...

Am I the first person to ever say this? Books move faster than TV. I can’t imagine that other people have not noticed this, too. It’s not just that when I’m reading, I can skip over endless paragraphs of description whenever a novel I’m reading feels padded. It’s not...

“I didn’t know that. I had no idea.” I always loved hearing comments like these when I spoke at libraries and book clubs about the history behind my novels. I can’t say that I sold a lot of books at these talks, but I have enjoyed stepping in front...

You’ll notice I wrote editor(s) because you might need more than one. I’ve had problems trusting professional editors in the past, so I haven’t made enough effort to find a good one. But after I published my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, without much editorial help at all, I...

I’m slowly rewriting short sections of my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, which I published in paperback and online more than three years ago. This is not something I would recommend that ANY novelist do. You should publish a novel once and move on. Why am I doing such...

It’s always interesting when you ask colleagues whose opinions you really respect for feedback, and what you hear from them is not good. That happened recently, for my new novel, SUNRISING, the sequel to A FALSE DAWN that I’m now preparing. Both their responses, basically, were on the order...