Memories


One of the things I have missed in the pandemic is getting new inputs and having new experiences. These lead to serendipities in my writing (problems solved and new directions taken) and keep me engaged and energized. A few months ago, just emerging from our isolation, my daughter and I went to a harbor-side restaurant…
If you want to write a non-fiction book, you need a book proposal to convince agents to represent your book and to convince editors to publish it. As a writer, I’ve found that the process of writing the proposal helps me wrestle with the prospect of spending the next year with this project. Do I love…
When I started writing The Wanderer, I didn’t expect to wind up featuring gods to the extent that the story does. At first I thought of it as an historical romance set in medieval England, which would make all of the characters Catholic. Religion didn’t play that much of a role in the story itself,…
One of the most difficult parts of writing a non-fiction book proposal is putting together the competitive analysis (this goes by various names but is basically the section where you compare your book to others like it). People often make several common mistakes. 1. They write the competitive analysis after they’ve written the rest of the proposal —…
The notebook I’m currently writing in has a little golden retriever puppy playing with a ball on the cover. I ran out of writing materials on my recent travels and my daughter had an extra notebook so she let me use hers. I feel like I need to write something really excellent in order to…
In the U.S., today is Independence Day. I took the day off from work not because I wanted to celebrate the country (I’m actually quite alarmed at what is happening here) but because it is always a day where I reflect on my own Independence Day, which happened in a November more than twenty years…