When I used to work for Bantam Books, back in the day, I occasionally was tasked with writing back cover copy for books that I had edited. I should say, rewriting. Bantam did have copywriters, but my boss, Carolyn, was a perfectionist when it came to back cover copy. After all, along with a book’s …
My daughter, who is taking a Music in Cultural Perspective course, sent this to me. Delightful song and video. Go ahead and dance.
I decided late in 2015 to do a complete overhaul of the books I’ve published. Along with my two e-books, Lost Mothers and Every New Beginning, I wanted to republish my five romances and my novel, Free Fall. So my wonderful agent, Paige Wheeler, her assistant, Ana-Maria Bonner, and I put our heads together and …
Every year, I do a class that I call Beginnings. I look at the beginnings of several fiction and nonfiction books and note the ones that I consider particularly well written. (And occasionally the ones that are poorly done.) Sometimes I simply pull books off my shelves. Sometimes I prowl the new releases at my …
A few months ago, I posted that I was going to write a mystery. I had decided to take the rather unwieldly general-fiction novel I was writing and recast it as a mystery. I did some research, since the book would deal in part with spies during World War II and the Cold War, and …
I posted several months ago about how one of my students went from a short story to a screenplay, coauthoring the screenplay with a friend of hers, Mark Battle. Mark is a filmmaker, and they have now gone from screenplay to film. During the summer Mark gathered a cast and crew and a 1991 Toyota …
A great rendition of Ravel’s “Bolero.”
In one of my advanced classes, three of the four students have been in class together for a few years. The fourth student joined more than a year ago. So they are all deeply familiar with one another’s novels (as am I, of course). One of the students, Brian, has been working on a marvelous, …
I have always loved mysteries. Maybe it’s because my favorite book when I was ten or so was Harriet the Spy. Actually, Mary Stewart’s romantic suspense novels, which a friend of my mother’s introduced me to when I was in my teens, were what really hooked me. I clearly recall walking to my local bookstore …
In the August 30, 2015, issue of the New York Times, an essay in the Magazine section caught my attention. Called “Standstill,” by Sam Anderson, it is an essay about “the political world’s obsession with the moment.” Acknowledging that modern humans weren’t the first to consider “the moment,” Anderson looks back to the Greeks to …