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An alternative cover
My publisher changed its mind about “Alternate History“. The primary reason: Amazon uses “Alternative History” as its category for ebooks and “Alternate History” for books. So here is today’s cover:...
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The Portal is now available from Amazon!
It’s time to enter The Portal. Okay, that’s a bit hokey, but seriously, the Kindle version of The Portal is now available. It’ll be up on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and other fine sites soon. Those of...
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Are five-word sentences the gospel truth?
Here’s a bland New York Times op-ed making the somewhat uncontroversial point that short sentences are good. Particularly after long sentences. Particularly at the end of paragraphs and chapters and...
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Rules for writing — Rule 12: End a chapter with a bang, not a whimper
My last post, on short sentences, reminded me that I haven’t been adding to my rules for writing, a somewhat randomly numbered series of guidelines that I try to follow, and you probably should too, if...
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Is Jeff Bezos the antichrist? Or maybe just one of the four horsemen of the...
Jonathan Franzen isn’t sure. In an article for Guardian Review before the publication of his new book, The Kraus Project, he writes: “In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American...
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Why do authors rewrite?
I’m a big fan of rewriting. But here’s an article from the Boston Globe making the point that rewriting hasn’t always been the standard. One reason was technology: In the age of Shakespeare and...
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Should a character’s name mean something?
The other day I had to introduce a couple of new characters in my novel and, as usual, this meant I had to pause and figure out what their names should be. Why is this so hard? This rule covers some...
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Forbidden Sanctuary: The alien escapes
My science-fiction novel Forbidden Sanctuary is a first-contact thriller in which one of the aliens who have landed here learns about Christianity from an interpreter who happens to be a devout...
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Temporary Monsters
Now that you have dutifully purchased Dover Beach at its amazingly low price of $0.99, you will want to also purchase my friend Craig Shaw Gardner’s new funny fantasy novel Temporary Monsters. If you...
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In which Jack Reacher starts to repeat himself
I liked One Shot, the first Jack Reacher novel I read. So I decided to try another – A Wanted Man. I listened to this one. And I was disappointed. The narrator, Dick Hill, was fine, although he...
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Print version of “The Portal” now available from Amazon!
Right here. It’s more expensive than the e-book version, of course, but don’t you like the feel of a real physical book in your hands? Also, don’t you think it would make a great Christmas present?...
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POD is PDQ
To check out the Print On Demand version of The Portal, I placed an order for it from Amazon on Saturday, with my two-day Amazon Prime shipping. It arrived today, Wednesday. So they were able to...
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Photos of my Print on Demand book
This is what the book looks like. For some background, see this post. Here’s the cover:And the back cover (somehow the angle makes it looks like there are no pages–but there are!):And the inside:I...
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Print on Demand pricing
One thing I’ve noticed in my brief experience with Print on Demand publishing: Amazon seems to vary its pricing constantly. The list price of the book (set by my publisher) is $15.99. When I bought...
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One final note on my Print on Demand venture
Ordered a carton of The Portal from my publisher last Saturday. Lightning Source (the POD vendor) shipped the books on Wednesday. They arrived on Friday. Now they’re clogging up my kid’s empty...
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Robot price wars — or, why does someone think my novel is worth $2425.70?
In his comment on the previous post, Jeff Carver pointed me to this article from a couple of years ago about an Amazon seller that charged $23 million dollars for an obscure academic book. Eisen...
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Christmas Eve in the world of “Dover Beach”
In this excerpt from my novel Dover Beach, the bookish would-be private eye Walter Sands spends Christmas Eve alone in a grim London hotel room, where he is haunted by memories of Christmases past....
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Writers in movies: Love Actually
It seems as if I’ve been seeing a lot of writers portrayed in movies lately. Here I mentioned the difficulty of portraying the writing life on film: it’s just too boring. But that doesn’t keep...
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Writers in moves: Leave Her to Heaven
This is my second offering in this series. Leave Her to Heaven was a popular film noir (beautifully filmed in Technicolor, actually) from 1945. Here is IMDB’s summary: A writer meets a young socialite...
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What do you do if you discover that you’ve made one huge mistake?
I’m closing in on the completion of the first draft of my novel, and I have finally, definitively realized that I made one huge mistake in my plotting. I revealed a secret too soon, and as a result...
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