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“Shared Notes & Highlights” for Dover Beach
How come I never noticed Amazon’s “Shared Notes & Highlights” section before? According to Amazon, these are “the thoughts and passages that Kindle readers have shared while reading this book.”...
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I am loathe to criticize anyone but . . .
I have a somewhat respectable day job in which I’m supposed to oversee a couple dozen highly experienced writers. In the past week, two different writers have sent me emails containing a sentence like...
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Faulkner on inspiration
Two of my favorite writing quotations come from William Faulkner: I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning. And in a similar vein: I don’t know anything...
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Where All the Ladders Start
I have looked at the novel I’ve been working on in all different seasons, at all different times of day, and I have finally decided its title is Where All the Ladders Start. Readers of a poetical...
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The Old Manse
Like Walden Pond, the Old Manse in Concord, MA is another American literary shrine just minutes away from where I work. I visited it decades ago, but a couple of weeks ago the entire company got to go...
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Copywriting for dummies: tooting my own horn
One of the challenges of being an independent author is that you’re responsible for everything associated with publishing your book, including editing, cover design, and marketing. I haven’t outsourced...
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Do world-class writers have world-class editors?
This question occurred to me as I read Haruki Murakami’s new novel, Colorless Tsukuri Tazaki And His Years of Pilgrimage (why can’t I come up with catchy titles like that?). Murakami is clearly a...
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Here’s the first chapter of my new novel
As I mentioned, the book is called Where All the Ladders Start. Those of you who have read its predecessors, Dover Beach and The Distance Beacons, will notice that I use a standard private-eye opening...
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Why Amazon is not a monopoly
Franklin Foer of The New Republic has joined the ranks of folks with Amazon Derangement Syndrome; take a look at this article. The best response I’ve seen is this blog post at the Washington Post (now...
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Jack London
… was born here: Which isn’t so far from here: Baseball! Writing! Go Giants!
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Bad advice for writers; also not funny
At first I thought this article on Bad Advice for Writers was pretty funny: Advice #4: Correct negative reviews There are only two types of reviews: the positive kind, and the kind where the reviewer...
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Writers in movies: The Romantic Englishwoman
Another in a random series. The Romantic Englishwoman is a 1975 movie with A-list credentials: it stars Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, it’s co-written by Tom Stoppard, and it’s directed by Joseph...
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First sentences
I finally got around to starting my new novel today. I wrote the first sentence, which goes like this: I was standing in the snack-food aisle of the 7-11 when I saw her. Pretty good, huh? Let’s...
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“Birdman” and Chekhov’s Gun
Birdman has gotten great reviews for its acting and its zippy direction. Underneath the long tracking shots and the magic realism, though, it’s a pretty standard backstage drama, the kind that would...
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Happy belated birthday to William Blake
I seemed to have missed it by a day. Here is his great poem “London”. Did anyone ever write a better phrase than “mind-forg’d manacles”? And did any two words ever pack more of a punch than...
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In which NaNoWriMo makes me feel bad
I was talking to a woman at work today. She’s had some health problems, but she’s feeling better and has a bit more energy. As a result, she told me, she just participated in National Novel Writing...
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High standards in publishing
Here’s a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), which imagines a world in which managers and engineers run the world. A woman is explaining why she has become a prostitute....
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The hardest thing about writing fiction…
. . . is transitions. I have spent most of the day getting my characters from one place to another. They were doing something interesting in the place they left. I am confident that they’ll do...
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In a league where success whithers away like a desiccated flower…
This over-the-top image is from a column in this morning’s Boston Globe talking about the Patriots. Notice the atrocity perpetrated on the poor word wither. It’s an odd mistake, because even my...
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Building worlds, and remembering them
A while back I told a friend of mine that I was working on the third book in my Last P.I. series (it’s called Where All the Ladders Start and it will be available incredibly soon now). He asked me,...
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