Recently, I had a short story published in the Baltimore Review. I tweeted out my good news, and another writer responded, asking me about writing short stories. He finished his question with “Do you think it’s worth it?” That stopped my fingers mid-tweet. “It depends on how you define worth,” I finally replied. There are…
Yes, I am back promoting the late Gary Reilly. This July, my partner Mike Keefe and I released Gary’s 15th (all posthumously published) book. It’s called Jeremy Bannister, or the Ups and Downs of An Aspiring Novelist. It’s an unusual book because Gary wrote every chapter the same length–one chapter to a page. It’s about…
If this were a typical year, I would be attending Colorado Gold conference this month. Besides a few workshops and the social activities, I would make sure to attend the editor and agent roundtables, where “the experts” answer questions and give advice to aspiring writers. Over the years, the questions asked at these programs were…
Recent social isolation has left us in our own bubbles with much less contact with other writers as sounding boards for our work. Living in an echo chamber, while it may make us productive in terms of word count (or not), may also have allowed us to drift back into bad habits we thought we…
There’s nothing like a cup of coffee to get the writing juices flowing. Ever the optimist, Albert Camus once posed the burning (or should I say, brewing) question: “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” What the oft-quoted prolific writer, who denied he was a philosopher, seemed to say has been the…