When I was about 5 years old, my favorite book was Captain Kitty. And by favorite, I mean I had my mother read it to me so many times that 35 years later I was still able to recite the first several pages even though my copy of the book was long gone, probably in…
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Over the summer, I released my urban fantasy novella, Dead Man’s Hand, as an e-book on Amazon. Maybe it was a timing thing, but it really seemed to fly under the radar, so I thought I’d post a sample. What follows is a short excerpt from the third chapter. If you’d like to see more,…
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Back when I had a literary agent sending my work out to major publishers, we ran into a little problem–editors at the major publishing houses didn’t know how to categorize my books, especially Take Back Tomorrow. It’s science fiction, a time travel novel set in 1940 Los Angeles. But it’s also a mystery, as the protagonist…
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I am giving away 2 signed copies of my novel, Take Back Tomorrow, on Goodreads. The contest runs until the end of this month.
I first came across a reference to Don Ryan when I was reading Kevin Starr’s Americans and the California Dream series, a remarkable history of California. Starr identified Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight as one of the first novels about Los Angeles and Hollywood, and since that was the focus of my dissertation, I sought out…
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I had the opportunity to participate in Fullerton College’s Faculty Reading Event last month–a good experience and a nice chance to read some of my work for an enthused and appreciative audience. Before reading from her novel in progress, one of my colleagues made a joke about “book envy,” in reference to the copies of…
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If you’re thinking about turning that manuscript into a Kindle file and starting on your own path to indie authorship, you’re likely to find it a pretty easy process–but maybe with one exception. Your Kindle file is going to need an active Table of Contents so users can go to the different chapters in your…
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So the editor of the Times Literary Supplement feels that book bloggers are doing a disservice to literary criticism, watering it down. Anyone with enough know-how to set up a blog and read a book can become a literary critic. On the one hand, there’s a legitimate concern there. The proliferation of voices on the…
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I’ve just finished listening to the audiobook version of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the preferred text read by the author. It’s been said that writers are often the worst readers of their own work, which may be true in some cases, but not this one. Gaiman’s rendering of the different characters’ voices is brilliant, vivid, and…
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