The Keyboard “Seduction”

Let's be honest: Who wants to read a book by a mope who tweets about their "failures"?

You Say “Favourite,” She Says “Favorite”

I will always remember what I was told after I revealed in 2013 I was writing Passports and showed the initial draft first to my (English) Mrs., and then to an English woman friend. Having read it, separately they both noticed that I was inadvertently mixing American-English language forms and British-English.

What Would Voltaire Say?

Writers: NEVER EVER EVER apologize for YOUR imagination and YOUR creations.

While She Was Alive

Over the previous three years, I had also fictionalized her in three novels, the last being that one above. In them I included reconstructions of various real-life interactions and even disagreements between us from back when I was in my 20s and young 30s. She never knew I had sneakily done that.

Day Of Rest

I read none of my Conventions manuscript yesterday beyond glimpsing its cover on Instagram and here in my post about it. I'm taking a few days away from the late 1700s to clear my head before I delve into correcting it from the beginning. I think this is probably the first time in months I…

He Says, She Says

During our phone chat a few weeks ago (because we weren't able to get together as hoped), my uncle told me that (based on what he'd read so far) he considered what I write nicely readable. That's a good thing, though, he asserted. If it's what I want, I should run with it. But I…

Obsessed By You

Yes, I wrote just the other day that I planned some time off. Well, I lasted two days. I have plunged now into fully outlining what had been the sketchy ideas I had had for the third novel. Although they are naturally exasperating at times, I am missing my fictional "friends" from Passports and Frontiers.…

In The Global Spotlight

American Revolutionary patriot and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, is quoted as once saying, "Either do something worth reading about, or write something worth reading." As writers, most of us probably lean a bit more towards trying to achieve the latter. And that's not unreasonable of us either. After all, doing something could well mean that something…