Thoughts on writing

If you’ve seen less of me online the latley, that’s because the internet stopped working at my place for a few days. It’s back now and I am scrambling to keep up with everything I missed and fell behind on. I feel like I am just about caught up, but it makes me wonder what we did before the internet. I’m thinking the life of a pre-internet writer pretty much consisted of sitting at a desk and writing. If they needed to look something up there was probably a dictionary close at hand. Something requiring more research might have involved a short note and a trip to the library at some point. Modern writers have a wealth of information at their fingertips. Unfortunately, all that information can be a bit distracting. When I need to look...

A little while back Kelsey who runs the fabulous blog The Book Scout interviewed me for an ongoing series of blog posts, and I’m excited to report that my interview is now up. So, if you’d like to learn a little bit more about me and find a great new blog head on over to The Book Scout.

Last week I accidentally created a new creature by typing the word “alligator” instead of “octopus” and creating a sort of alligator octopus hybrid, which isn’t quite as scary as this picture of a bearsharktopus found on RationalSkepticism.org but still isn’t something I’d like to run into the next time I’m out for a swim. Thankfully, Sarah and her sharp eyes caught my mistake and I was able to make the needed correction. That was nearly as bad as the time I sent my cousin an email about how I had won a writing contest. The only problem was that I had typed it as “one a writing contest.” I don’t know what was worse, the ironic typo or the fact that it was pointed out to me by my art major...

One of my mother’s favorite authors, Dorothea Benton Frank was in town this evening for a book signing, so I accompanied Mom on a trip down to the Clinton Book Shop. Dorothea had lots of fun writing stories to share including some horror stories from her first book tour including an ill-fated trip to a Georgia Barnes & Noble where the event manager had quit and no one knew about her arrival and she ended up talking to an audience of two who turned out to just be there for the air conditioning. But my favorite part of her talk was her answer to the question of what got her started writing. She told the audience that it was a fight with her husband that made her decide to start writing. She was mad at her husband for not buying her family home when they...

Hey, there. I’m not here today, but you can read a guest blog post about a book I haven’t written over at Jeff Widmer’s Crossroads blog. Oh, and don’t forget to stop back here tomorrow to read Jeff’s great post on book promotion.

Stephen Parrish, author of The Tavernier Stones is here today to answer a few of my questions,  but before we start the interview, I want to tell you to do  yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Tavernier Stones. It’s a great novel full of adventure, mystery and puzzles to solve and it is a perfect summer reading book. I really enjoyed this novel, and in one of those weird ways that real life and fiction have of intersecting when I sat down to read it, I was surprised to find that a big chunk of the story was set in Lancaster, PA where I had just been a few days earlier. Also if you need one more reason to read The Tavernier Stones (you shouldn’t!) it is published by Midnight Ink, which like Flux (who is publishing my novel next year) is an...