I’ve made a bittersweet decision. I’m setting aside the novel I’ve been writing all year. Leaving it unfinished. Moving on to something new. I took a gamble. The treatment for this project was outside my regular milieu. Still, it “felt” like my work. I was excited during the planning phase, but I got the first […]

There are no swear words in my books, though I can assure you my regular dialogue is rife with them, as is my inner monologue. Like all true Americans, I don’t trust people who don’t swear, so I feel that I owe my readers an explanation. If you can’t trust the guy who writes your […]

Shouldn’t I have done this in January? Probably, but that would make me the efficient, on-the-ball sort of writer who gets chided by all of the other writers for setting the bar too high (or, more accurately, picking it up off the floor). I don’t intentionally align my novel timelines with the calendar year, but […]

The Wrong Way to Write a Novel When I first started writing The Winter Riddle, I’d been reading too much George R. R. Martin. I’d gotten ideas. I started without a plan, just a theme and a handful of characters. I wrote about a dozen chapters, completely out of sequence, from the perspectives of different characters that I […]