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My own Imitation Game
Went to see The Imitation Game, and it’s pretty good! Alan Turing was, of course, a seminal figure in computer science, and his imitation game, or Turing Test, provides an interesting way of thinking...
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My new novel “Where All the Ladders Start” is available now!
My new novel Where All the Ladders Start is out on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and other fine ebook retailers. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, it’s the third book in...
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My novel “Dover Beach” is available for $0.99!
While I’m shilling for my books here, I should mention that the first book in my Last P.I. series, Dover Beach, is available on Amazon for a mere $0.99. That’s like almost free! The idea here, of...
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Fire and Ice
It’s starting to feel like the end times around here. The heart of our downtown area is closed off because the weight of the snow caused a building to collapse. I went to a grocery store yesterday,...
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“Where All the Ladders Start”: The printed books have arrived!
Here’s what the book looks like: I’m all in favor of ebooks, but physical books do seem more “real,” don’t they? But here’s the problem you run into with printed books: My publisher got complaints...
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First person, third person
I continue to intermittently make my way through Lee Child’s oeuvre, and I recently listened to The Enemy, from 2004.. It has much of what I’ve come to expect from a Jack Reacher novel: a crackerjack...
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God’s Bankers and Pontiff: Too Improbable for Fiction
A major subplot of my twisty thriller Pontiff involves the secretive Vatican Bank and a new pope’s desire to clean it up. There’s a new book out called God’s Bankers by Gerald Posner that goes into...
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The fluffy bunnies are here to get their revenge
My friend Craig Shaw Gardner has ever-so-slowly been releasing his funny fantasy novels as ebooks. His Cineverse Cycle has finally arrived, and that’s a good thing for humanity. Here’s the overall...
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So that’s what my novel is all about!
When I’m writing a novel, there usually comes a point when I realize what it’s all about. Not the details of the plot–working them out is a constant process–but the reason I’m bothering to write it....
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No! Not an unreliable narrator!
In my post about first person narrative, I forgot to mention the sub-genre of unreliable first-person narrators. In my misspent book-reading youth I was quite enamored of such contrivances, even...
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Hardly a man is now alive…
This is the 240th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride. Longfellow’s poem starts like this: Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in...
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It’s Shakespeare’s birthday, so let’s randomly replace words with “duck”
Put aside your well-thumbed copy of Timon of Athens and go to this site, obviously created by folks with too much time on their hands. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your duck. Note that you can...
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Should Charlie Hebdo get an award?
PEN wants to give Charlie Hebdo its “freedom of expression courage” award. This has provoked an outcry from many writers. PEN isn’t backing down, saying that they reject the “assassin’s veto”. My son...
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Diagramming the first sentences of famous novels
For Christmas one of my sons gave me a wonderful present–a poster showing the grammatical diagrams of the opening sentences of some famous novels. What a kid! Here’s a column about this poster.titled...
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World-building and storytelling
Posting has been light while I’ve tried to meet my goal of finishing the first draft of my novel in six months. I probably won’t make it, but I’ll come close. This is a sequel to my novel The Portal,...
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A nice review for “The Portal”
On Amazon: The book is primarily written for the pre-teen or early teenager, I believe anyway, but I really enjoyed it. The characters pre teens in their world, were transferred to another world, in a...
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I’ve finished the first draft of my novel!
So, from my perspective, it’s turned from an idea to a thing. A thing that needs a lot of rewriting and reworking, but it’s real. It exists. I think I’ll take tomorrow off and run in a road race.
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In which I run into Edgar Allen Poe
I was walking from the Boston Common over to Jacob Wirth’s after my road race when I ran into this guy with his pet raven at twilight: Poe was born in Boston in Boston in 1809, although he went to...
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Chekhov’s hunting rifle; Chekhov’s ornamental sword
We’ve talked about “Chekhov’s gun“–the rule in storytelling that when you show a gun early in a story, you have to use it before the end. You’ve established expectations that need to be fulfilled....
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I thought my novel was going to Oakland, but instead it ended up in Auckland
We were discussing the conclusion of my novel in my writing group. The novel had taken a bit of an unexpected direction. Well, more than a bit. How had it ended up in a woodshed in the wilds of a...
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