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I love alternate histories. They are the greatest of “what ifs.” The biggest trope in this genre: What if the Allies lost World War II? But before it was even a trope, Philip K. Dick wrote the novel The Man in the High Castle. The U.S. is divided by the Nazis in the east and the Empire of […]
I flipped through one 40-year-old comic book the other day and was suddenly reminded of books I’d read and music I’d listened to way back then. My time trip happened when I rummaged through the small collection of comic books from my youth to find the handful of “Guardians of the Galaxy” books I’d read in 1975. I was […]
I love newspapers. Pretty much all newspapers. Big city dailies. Small town weeklies. Broadsheets. Tabloids. Even Berliners. I even have a special place in my heart for supermarket tabloids (a category created, I guess, to differentiate them from newsstand tabloids likes those of the Murdoch/New York Post variety). But the supermarket tabloids I really love are gone […]
Collisions that happen in my mind: “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Interstellar” and Howard Johnson. Okay, the first two are obvious for the way the first movie informed the second. (How many “2001” references did you count in “Interstellar”?) But Howard Johnson? Easily explained. I happen to be working on scenes in my work-in-progress set in […]
I’m interviewed on this week’s Suspense Magazine podcast. I had a great time talking about LAST WORDS, crime novels and getting a book noticed with Publisher John Raab. You’ll find the show here: Suspense Radio Inside Edition – November 8th, 2014 If you give it a listen, come back to the blog and let me know what you think.
Most everything I read about the future of the book takes on the didactic nature of all online debate. Amazon good. Amazon bad. Self publishing good. Self publishing bad. Big 5 good. Big 5 bad. You’re wrong. You are. Shut up. No you. As counter to that, The Economist published a brilliant essay a week […]
I first discovered McFarland & Co. Publishers many years ago when I bought the book Unsold Television Pilots 1955-1988 by Lee Goldberg. It was a delicious compendium of TV shows pitched to the networks as scripts or actual pilot episodes that didn’t get made into series. It was nerdy joy. I could look up all the shows Star […]
We’re in the midst of Banned Books Week, the annual effort by publishers, booksellers, librarians and authors to call attention to the fact that even in 2014 we live in the world of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. People are still trying to ban books from public and school libraries. Probably burn them too. My thinking is if a big […]
I’m fascinated by time and memory and how they wind round each other. That’s probably why I’m writing a historical mystery series set in the mid-Seventies, and why I’ve got a middle-grade time travel story in the works. Earlier this summer, I visited the Lake George area of upstate New York for the first time since […]
The crossroads of America is right outside my Super 8 room in Ticonderoga. The Walmart in the rear is in full view of the window. Catty-corner across the intersection are the remains of a grocery store the Walmart must have cratered. McDonald’s, at Walmart’s entrance, advertises the kinds of job America is being built on these days. “Closing shifts, 8p […]