This could be you if you watched Hidden Figures or Dunkirk, had your socks knocked off after reading Crystal King’s Feast of Sorrow or Whitney Scharer’s The Age of Light, or managed to keep pace with the 166 ghosts in George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. You finish and say to yourself, I could do that. I could definitely write that. If…
“A person lacking bones is a jellyfish—an aimless, floating blob.” – Anon An earlier post discussed this cool idea I had one Christmas vacation for a science fiction trilogy, and how I began by finding pictures of my imagined characters on the internet and summarizing them in a character outline. Each one had their own…
My question seemed simple: what fauna flourished around Rome and Ostia in the first century? Creating the world of my historical novel depended on getting the right answer, so I did what any good fiction writer does—I googled, purchased and read a variety of books (above), and even traveled to the place. Obsessing the details is…
I’m not much of a planner. This is not a philosophical stance, just the way my brain works. I jump with both bare feet into whatever stream interests me. I don’t pick the best spot on the stream or check the speed of the current. I go. It’s only after I’ve experienced some of the…
My wife and I were sitting down to lunch in Greece at a rooftop restaurant shaded by a vined trellis. It was summertime, about 90 degrees F. Sweat dotted my forehead. Dogs lay on their sides in the road then lumbered onto all fours and ambled away lazily, without purpose. The numerous feral cats were…
Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” Now that I’ve been writing novels for several years, I couldn’t agree more. When I began my first book, Nicole Kiernan, a colleague at work who had contributed to several screenplays, advised me to put quality time…
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