Publishers Weekly, the main trade magazine for the publishing industry, recently featured a nice review for my latest book, The Call of the Mild. The book, which I co-wrote with Torry Martin, is a sequel to Of Moose and Men, and it continues the wild but true...
NOTE—An earlier blog, Doing Your Research Right, discussed my research habits when writing historical novels. This is a follow-up blog.  *  *  * I guess I should have known what day it was when I showed up at the old watchtower in Berlin in 2011. I didn’t...
I’m not sure what historical novelists did before the advent of the Internet. What takes a matter of minutes to discover on the Internet today probably took hours of library work in the pre-Web Stone Age. A case in point: In my first historical novel, The...
I’m not sure how he did it, but the late Michael Crichton supposedly wrote 10,000 words a day, which is the equivalent of about 40 pages. His keyboard must have been on fire by day’s end. But don’t be discouraged by such examples of insane productivity. His...
Whenever I see somebody writing in a noisy coffee shop, tapping away on a laptop, I wonder how in the world they can concentrate with all of the racket surrounding them. For me, the two major requirements for writing are quiet and no interruptions. In a crowded coffee...
My favorite canine writer, Snoopy of Peanuts fame, received a boatload of rejection slips in his pursuit of a publisher over the years, and some of them are gems. "Dear contributor, thank you for submitting your story to our magazine," one publisher wrote to Snoopy....