Sounds dramatic, I know, to say that writing can save your life. But during this long period of staying at home, writing has saved my life. It’s given me something to look forward to, something to do every day, something to think about, plan for, assemble notes for, blather...

Hard to believe, but three years after self-publishing my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, I’m still considering how to rewrite it to make it better. I’ve already written the sequel, which should be published soon. But my first novel haunts me. For years, my main character, Louise, has seemed...

Writing historical fiction is a joy that never seems to end. I’m now editing the sequel to my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, and I have so much cool information that won’t fit into the sequel that I’m starting to use this info to write some short stories based...

I talk to people all the time about things they’d like to write, if only they had the time. Well, now we do. All of us. I hope some of these people take the opportunity to start the projects they’ve been dreaming about, sometimes for years. What a joy...

One good thing that I hope will come out of this pandemic is that we all, myself included, learn to appreciate the simple pleasures that we often take for granted: meeting with friends, taking a long walk, cooking a good meal for yourself and others, and of course, reading....

“Unless he is writing mechanically, the writer does not experience his writing as an act of creation. He experiences it as an act of discovery. It comes or happens or is given to him. And when it does, he recognizes it at once for his own.” Norman Podhoretz wrote...

“One needs courage not only to murder one’s own things, but also to defend them.” So said Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer, in 1936. In my last post, I attacked myself for what I perceived as the limitations in my first novel, A FALSE DAWN. Yes, it was my...

A confession: I did not write my first novel, A FALSE DAWN, because I loved the idea of writing a novel. I wrote it because I wanted to get the story out there, to readers, especially in Hollywood, and my first version, which was a screenplay, did not sell....

Everyone romanticizes the idea of writing a novel. The work itself is very satisfying, but you have to wait a long, long time to get any recognition for it, if you ever get it at all. Writing for a living was different. I worked for 30 years as a...

I’m still rewriting my first novel – in notes that I take, in my head. This is three years AFTER I published A FALSE DAWN, mind you. And this is after I republished the damned book twice, with changes and additions, because I got good feedback from readers that...