NEVER SPEAK has been out for 10 weeks. Thank you, everyone who has bought and reviewed it! News: NEVER SPEAK in its first library appearance at the Cutler Memorial in Plainfield, VT. Thank you, Jane Youngbear! I’m writing a prequel novella mystery to the Murderous Arts series, tentatively titled RAY OF DARKNESS. It takes place at…
When Art Imitates Life
Photo by Jack Alexander on Unsplash How a chance encounter turned me into a novelist. I first came to Hudson, NY in the early aughties. I’d been carrying on a long love affair with the past, so I took right to Warren Street, with its 165 antique stores. Each had its niche–Second Empire, Art Deco, Fifties Modern, 60s kitsch–making them feel…
Michael Pollan’s Book on Psychedelics is Exciting
Photo by Lucas Benjamin on Unsplash But I see a hidden danger in it. When I first heard of Michael Pollan’s bestselling book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence I was glad. The truth was finally getting out to the public. Rather than being…
Marketing Your Art is a Special Hell
But only if you think it is. Like many of my stories, this one has a front end (the present) and a back (the past.) I’ll start with the past. 1980 I was living in a fifth floor walkup in the scary northern tip of Manhattan, trying to get someone—anyone!— to pay me to…
Grand Opening of the Murderous Arts Gallery!
Featuring Pieces that inspired Never Speak, book one in the Murderous Arts Series. I. RAY’S HOUSE The protagonist of Never Speak is Ray Watts, a visual artist who lives above his gallery in Hudson, NY. Ray has gothic taste. His patron saint is Edgar Allen Poe, with whom he shares a weakness for absinthe….
The One Indispensable Word of Advice for Writers
Persist. Four years ago, I’d completed two novels in a mystery/thriller series. There was a lot of media buzz about self-publishing, and I was on the fence as to whether to go that way or hold out for a traditional deal. Over the months that I hemmed and hawed over my dilemma, I sensed that…
I Love the Dark
Reader, Beware! As a kid I read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Though I knew it was fiction, I became obsessed with the desire to go to the center of the earth. My mother got me a little book The Story of Caves. It told of holes in the ground and…
10 Great TV Series
I wrote here how TV series have become the best vehicles for storytelling. Here are some of my favorites: 1. Breaking Bad. Walt is a good guy facing a terrible thing: lung cancer. When he leaves this earth he’d like to leave his family unsaddled by poverty and debts. So he makes a bad choice….
The Most Gripping Thing I’ve Read in Years
It’s not a book in my preferred mystery/thriller genre, not a book at all, or even short story, but this New Yorker article, about the best-selling author of the mystery/thriller The Woman in the Window. The article is a very long read—12,000 words—but I scarfed it down in one sitting, even though I’d laid down…
TV is the New Great American Novel
The New York Times weekly column “By the Book” interviews authors and famous people about what they read. Most have a bedside table threatening collapse from the mountain of books piled on it. They sprinkle their reading lists with obscure works, like that new translation of a 18TH century Latvian poet I’ve never heard of….
Luminous Muse
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