The April 24, 2017 issue of Publishers’ Weekly carries a review of my debut novel, Defiled. It is a privilege and an honor to be reviewed by the industry’s premier magazine and I am grateful. Relatively few books are accorded this honor. I found the review to be accurate in both its praise and its…

Over the weekend I attended a writer’s workshop in Atlanta and was inspired by Chuck Sambuchino’s speeches (you know him as the editor of Writers’ Digest) and a meeting with Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media. These soirees are always the source of insightful information about the writing craft and the writing business. They also provide…

I’ve read interviews with William Faulkner, Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe and as I’ve compared the questions those legends were asked to the questions I’m now asked by interviewers, I’ve become aware of the changes in readers’ tastes, and in the measures by which we judge “good writing”, and of the change…

Ran across this quote from George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm): “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention,…

Ah, the Holidays, the season when our hearts overflow with goodwill toward our fellow man. Well, maybe some hearts have little capacity for joy. The scene yesterday was the overflowing parking lot at a suburban Atlanta mall. Lines of cars waited impatiently for shoppers to empty spaces and make room for new arrivals. I was…

Friends and family ask what I want for Christmas and I invariably tell them: books. Which books? Anything new by Joseph Kanon, Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Harris, Olen Steinhauer, Nelson DeMille or Michael Lewis, I tell them.  At the moment, Mr. Smith has a new title on bookshelves called The Girl from Venice. I expect to find…

Many newly published novels, perhaps even most of them, have easily recognizable heroes and villains. The heroes are all-powerful, all-avenging, pure-of-heart, upstanding citizens. The villains are easily recognizable as well–pure evil packaged in human form. No complex explanations are needed to justify the actions of either the heroes or the villains. The villains do evil because…

There are three questions I usually get asked in interviews that I particularly like and wanted to answer here in case readers don’t see the other interviews. These are the three most fundamental questions that can be asked about Defiled and provide readers with interesting (I hope) insight into the writing of the novel. Why did you write…

Writer’s Digest has just announced its 24th “Dear Lucky Agent” contest on its GLA (Guide to Literary Agents) blog. This is a free contest for writers of literary and upmarket fiction http://tinyurl.com/hmelhd3 judged by agent @AnnieAHwang, via @chucksambuchino.

Over the Labor Day weekend, Defiled was unveiled for the public at the Atlanta Journal Constitution Decatur Book Festival and I learned all over again the basics of selling a product new to the market.  Over and over again I was asked, “What’s it about?” or “What kind of book is it?”  There are any number of…