process

It Always Seems Impossible Until It’s Done

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Greetings, Dear Reader. I’m dictating this blog entry while walking on my treadmill, so please excuse me if I ramble or my “smart” phone substitutes incorrect homophones (e.g., “there, their, they’re”). As you’ll soon read, I have a lot going on and need to multitask. I think it’s been over a year since I last … Read more

On the Virtues of Being Able to Write Anywhere

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Compared to other novelists I know or have read about, I’m something of an anomaly: I’m a novelist who can write just about anywhere. While I enjoy having a dedicated space for my writing, an actual home office, “a room of one’s own” as Virginia Woolf put it, I’m not one of those precious novelists … Read more

Backstory: The Story Behind the Second Dakota Stevens mystery, The Rich Are Different — Part 2

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Last week, in Part 1 of the story behind The Rich Are Different, I described my experiences during 9/11 in Manhattan and the months following, and how they pushed me to quit my corporate job and focus on being a novelist full-time. Now, in Part 2, I’m going to describe the development of the novel that … Read more

Writing in Asian Restaurants

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I’m writing this blog entry in one of my favorite Asian restaurants: Momiji in Rhinebeck, NY. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve been writing in Asian restaurants for over 25 years. Maybe it’s that when Chinese or Japanese waitresses get talking in their native tongues, their voices take on a soothing quality, surrounding me … Read more

My Prodigiously Convoluted Yet Miraculously Productive Low-Tech Writing Process — Part 2 — With a Few Modest Writing Secrets

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In the first installment of this piece, I described the first half of my writing process: Writing the first draft in longhand or on a typewriter Storing the completed draft in a drawer Editing the hand- or type-written manuscript with a blue pen Retyping the manuscript into a word processor Now, hold on to your … Read more

My Prodigiously Convoluted Yet Miraculously Productive Low-Tech Writing Process — Part 1

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I’m writing this blog entry on my latest piece of low-tech equipment, an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. All told, I now have six typewriters: • The Lettera 32           • A Royal Quiet Deluxe           • An Olympia SM9 Deluxe           • An … Read more

Being a Novelist Isn’t a Job, It’s a Lifestyle

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Back in December, after having completed the first draft of a 550,000-word, 1,600-page novel, I took a nearly month-long vacation (my first in years). For one week of the vacation, my wife and I explored Quebec, stayed at at a ski resort, and went cross-country skiing, swimming and hot-tubbing every day. One afternoon in the … Read more

Paying Attention as a Fiction Writer

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I have been writing fiction since I was 13 years old, when I first read Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger and was swept away not only by the story, but also by Fleming’s eloquence. This marks the thirty-second year that I’ve been writing (not necessarily publishing) fiction, and one of the things about writing that has never ceased … Read more