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...
Location, Location, Location: Doing Novel Research On-Site
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...
Doing Your Research Right
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...
How Many Words Should You Write Per Day?
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...
Where is the Best Spot for Writing?
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 Five Rules for Writing
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....