American Novelist
For over ten years, or 3,697 days to be exact, I’ve been working on a novel about teens in the 1980s. The novel eventually became so long (over a million words, and twice the length of War and Peace) that I had to split it into nine books or episodes. The result, Bodaciously True & … Read more
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
About five months ago, I bought a countdown clock that sits directly below my computer monitor, and for 157 days it’s been ticking down. It’s been ticking down to my self-imposed deadline for the second draft of my behemoth epic novel (a series, actually). Last December, I set a deadline for myself: I would finish … Read more
The opening sentence of Perpetuating Trouble is absolutely true: “I was told to write this book by a pair of alien girls.” That incident with the alien girls, along with everything else in my memoir about the writing life, really happened. Enter a Pair of Alien Girls On a glittering October morning in 2008, I … Read more
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
