Hello! I know I have been quiet this past week. Let me explain: We are in New York, in the Catskills, at our house here, and have just completed a "mini-quarantine" under New York anti-Covid guidelines for arriving travelers.
I do not expect, or even hope...
...to be able to please every reader.
And I do not count words as I write.
We as Americans among ourselves may at times forget - or we are MANIPULATED into forgetting by demagogues such as the soon to be ex-president - that we have more in common than we may realize.
I hope you go to Eternity thinking, "Yeh, that bastard Robert was right." Damn straight. I do know a helluva lot more about it than you and your ilk do.
I have spent a lot of time recently staring at and frantically typing more of the new manuscript. One thing I have learned since 2013 is that there is no easy way to write a novel. Don't believe anyone who tells you it is not a big effort.
This post is perhaps mostly for you other author "nerds" out there, I guess. I am sure you have your opinion on this too. I hope, though, others of you might find it interesting, of course.
Given my relatively low author profile, when I think about it I am awestruck at how many of my books have been bought over the years. But this 2020 is not just any year; these are extraordinary times.
It has been another tough week for many of us. Thus 2020. So I think what this blog requires some lightheartedness and maybe even a cup of hot cocoa.
There seems something in the American psyche that is incapable of treating French people, as, well, ordinary people. That is probably because it is drilled into the American subconscious by now almost from birth that "the French" stand out among Europeans as particularly "mean"...
I HATE talking politics on here. However, there are those moments in our lives when SOME things MUST be made ABSOLUTELY clear.
Now, back to books...
I voted for her in 2016. I did so because she was much more experienced and competent than him. And I feel 2020 has PROVEN that to be correct.
This 2020 one suspects must be a lot like how it felt during the Great Depression of the 1930s amidst Hollywood's "golden age," when millions around the world flocked to cinemas for a few hours to forget their problems and see the "stars" they adored.
Traveling as much as I have since my early twenties, I have come to understand that the wider the variety of those you come to know, the more you do learn - or you should learn.
Maybe as a consequence of my stance I don't attract quite as many readers overall. I don't care. My conscience is clear.
I opened in 2013 with a modern travel novel, and two sequels, set in the 1990s and written of course in our current day English. If you have been with me since before 2017, you know. If you don't...
