Okay, so I’m planning to publish Any Tomorrow: The Culling, the final novel of the Any Tomorrow Trilogy, in January.  Everything is ready to go.  The problem is that a few weeks ago I started working on what I thought would be a new novel tentatively called The Last Pope…

Although she regularly reads my blog, my wife, Malette, isn’t comfortable with the horror/fantasy genre.  She likes other things.  One of her favorite writers is Johanna Lindsey.  And that’s okay, different strokes for different folks, as they say. But there are times I’m envious of Leo Tolstoy whose wife, Sofia,…

In my blog over the past year I’ve discussed how the inspiration for a character or a character type is often drawn from real life.  Here is another instance.  At work, for the past few days I’ve been cleaning out filing cabinets, tearing through thousands of paper files, condemning the…

Yesterday I read an article that said that the Voyager I spacecraft, launched in 1979, is now 11 billion miles from the sun.  Eleven billion miles.  That’s 11,000,000,000 miles.  A very long way from home.  Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy adds some perspective: “Space,” it says,…

I am pleased to announce that I have received my first check from Amazon Digital Services for sales of my two novels.  A little celebratory music please! Okay, that’s enough. Now that the music and cheering across blogosphere has subsided, the reality of the first payment sets in.  After more…

We hear a lot these days about the trauma suffered by soldiers who go to war, but is it possible for a soldier to be traumatized by not going to war?  If you think about it, there was a period between the end of the Vietnam Conflict and the Operation…

Turkey Day and Black Friday have passed, typically two days of consumer excess.  By now the good dishes have been washed and put away, the holiday silverware is safely back in the special green felt-lined wooden box tucked back in the buffet. Most of the leftover turkey and sides have…

Since I had a few minutes, I thought I might explain the genesis of “Sock Monkey, Crucified”, a story I wrote for my last post.  The story provides a good example of how simple things observed have the potential to create fiction.  Was the story good or bad?  I’m not…

My Halloween post included part of a story and I posed the question as to where you might take the story, given its various elements.  Today’s post includes one solution for the story.  Certainly there may be others and if you’ve given the subject some thought I certainly hope you’ll…

It’s Halloween and I couldn’t let my favorite holiday go by without a post. Nothing eerie, nothing scary, just a little odd. Think about this. Chester Hendricks was not a superstitious man by any standard definition of the word.  He wasn’t scared of black cats and he cared nothing about…