I hadn’t intended to share “Secrets,” the story I published earlier this month. When I read the printed version, I discovered errors: “compliment” for “complement”; “shinning” for “shining.” The punctuation was flawed with double periods in several pla
All I wanted to do in my retirement years was write. I presumed the easiest way to do that was to find a publisher and let the company go through the mechanics of getting my books into print. So far that decision has proved unsatisfactory. I won’t go into details, but gi
When I was a child of five, one of the first books I read in school was about Dick, Jane and a dog named Spot. They lived in a house with a picket fence on a sunny street with a mother and father named Mr. And Mrs. Little. Dick, Jane, and Spot had many adventures and I lov
People sometimes ask if I’ve thought about publishing a selection of my blogs in book form. Naturally, I’m flattered, just as I am when they suggest my novels would make great movies. Such notions don’t swell my head. Steven Spielberg, I know, won’t be calling soon. 
Appropriate to the season, a friend gave me a gift certificate to Powell’s bookstore. Overjoyed, I hurried off to use it before it got lost in the midst of my move to the retirement center. Choosing a book wasn’t hard. I keep a list on my refrigerator door.
When Stephen Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time came out several years ago, someone hid money at the back of one copy to see if anyone got to the end of this complex work on cosmology. The book hit the best seller list and remained there for 4 years, but no on
I’ve never read a book by John Updike, mainly because he was never required in college and I identified him with “the boys,” who included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and touching upon Ernest Hemmingway and Norman Mailer, writers whom I have read but whose world view I don’t much
The edits on my memoir have returned, so for the next several weeks, I’ll be focusing on rewrites. I’ve been working on this book for the past two years and, at the current rate, I fear it may take me longer to draft my recollections of past events than to have lived them. If
I sat down to brunch with friends, recently, a long overdue pleasure. As they were friends, they asked how my memoir was progressing. “Oh,” I replied, the genre isn’t called a memoir anymore. It’s referred to as “literary nonfiction.” “What’s the difference?” The
Who would have imagined writing young adult novels could be dangerous? Even so, writer Jesse Singal contends social media sites have become centers for whisper campaigns against authors who violate a new canon. The emerging standard requires rigid authenticity. For example, a book a