The Booktrope version of Sandcastle and Other Stories: The Complete Edition is now available for Pre-Order. What a wild ride on a long and curvy road. I thank everyone for making this day happen. Readers, fans, friends, and family, I am throwing gratitude your way. It’s not often a book is published three separate times…
A wonderful weekend began with a book signing author event at Watermark Book Co. in Anacortes, Washington, my hometown bookstore. I couldn’t have been happier since Hark—A Christmas Collection is my very first book with Booktrope, a new kind of hybrid book publisher that a friend recommended to me after one of this year’s more…
The new scene takes shape as Frederick Waltzcrop, with Camoustra and Frenalto, two of the names from the actual play, my own wicked version of Flotsam and Jetsom, find a place to live while living on Fidalgo Island. What better place than a hand-built, stone castle. There is a real castle house here on the…
Hello Dear A Writer’s Life Readers, I realize I have been away for too much time, of late, and I hope this opening section of my current Work In Progress, The Play (The Queen’s Idle Fancy), tides you over. I’m having a blast sorting through the history of this forbidden and condemned play, almost lost…
I’m reading a little-known book written in 1895, The King in Yellow, a free public domain ebook on kindle, and it’s linked to the True Detective television series in the most interesting ways. The story is set in a future world of 1920 and centers on a book/play that makes people mad/insane after they read…
In honor of Valentine’s Day, I wanted to share a poem I place in my favorite poetry jar. I was writing away in the fiction department while Connie was splicing together her lines and phrasing in the poetry department of Bowling Green State University, creating depth out of striking verbal compositions. Not so long ago,…
I love studying the hubris of man, how we rise and fall throughout our lives—me included. I also love to observe people, listen to what they are saying to each other in a group or how someone speaks to someone on a cell phone out in the open. Usually this bugs others, but at times…
I must’ve read Donna Tartt’s first grand-in-theme novel, The Secret History, three times so far in this lifetime (hehe), but resisted The Little Friend—boy was I a dunce. It’s just as terrific, and gothic, and lush. Can’t wait to read her new book, The Goldfinch. Tartt’s an author of twisty mysteries that dwell on…
In this new year, change is good. Helping spread the word about my thoughtful, and thought-provoking novella, The Conversationalist, Jade gets “the skinny” on my long story in seven chapters, smack in the heart of psychological thriller country, dating, bad dates, a gothic atmosphere, the foggy, misty San Juan Island area north of Seattle, stuck…
I love pop culture. Learning to read was only the beginning, and it ruined me in a good way . . . raised on television of the seventies, All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and reruns of the sixties, shows from Bewitched to Gilligan’s Island and the classic Star Trek episodes playing each post-schoolday afternoon, taught…