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My Books

What marathoning taught me about life and writing

About one of the most painfully life-changing things I’ve ever done is to take up marathoning. In the end, plagued by a varied array of injuries, after running four misery-riddled races, I opted for shorter distances. I still go running a few miles here and there, during which I manage to clear my head and […]

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Introducing the Tracking Jane Series

By early fall of 2014 I will release a new series of stories following Jane McMurtry, an injured Army veteran who has spent her adult life training warrior dogs and partnering with them to find bombs and track missing soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jane comes home having suffered grievous injuries during an IED explosion. […]

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Don’t Count Your Words; Make Your Words Count

Recently, I’ve enjoyed magical days during which I’ve clocked ten thousand or more words. This blessed outpouring came during my recently released Decisive Moment and has taken place again during my ongoing work on episodes 1 and 2 of my Tracking Jane series. Trouble is, this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes I barely squeeze out five […]

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About the Our Cyber World Series

    Starting with DEAD BEEF, and expanding with Pink Ballerina, Decisive Moment and Active Shooter, the Our Cyber World series explores a complex world as conveyed through the different points of view and voices each story’s leading characters offer. Rather than applying a straight sequel-prequel chronological story structure, this series follows a paralellequel approach. […]

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The Art of Flashback: instantaneous, intense illumination

In both my reading and writing, I’ve always struggled with flashbacks. As a reader, I’ve trudged through my fair share of voluminous, interminable flashbacks, wondering when I’m getting back into present action, and quite honestly, at times feeling like I’m in a lecture hall while my professor/author data-dumps all he knows about a situation and/or […]

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Decisive Moment gets a new cover

Just wanted to drop a quick note about Decisive Moment, namely about its cover which I decided to spiff up a bit. These are shown below, new and old, and in case you haven’t checked it out yet, I include a brief description of the story. If you want a fast, character-based read, check out […]

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Concise Writing in Random Tweetable thoughts

Will Twitter help your writing? By that I mean the act of writing, the craft, as opposed to the ability to promote your writing through a stream of hashtags, links, faves and re-tweets. Will expressing yourself 140 characters at a time over-constrain your ability to convey your thoughts, will it stifle your vision? Or will […]

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What Indie Publishing and Signal Processing Theory Have in Common

In case you haven’t heard, indie publishing is cheapening literature. As the claim goes, the proliferation of self-published work and the lowering of the bar for what gets published create a cacophony of noise that threatens to drown out good books and their authors. This will drive down the quality of all published books, suppress […]

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Working on that author portrait

How’s your author portrait looking? Did it come from a cellphone selfie, or did you use your laptop’s webcam to capture it? Maybe it turned out OK, but… well, I’m seeing a lot of these around, at indie author Amazon pages, and they’re hurting. Bad lighting, no lighting, too wide an angle that makes you […]

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The Ugly, the OK and the Improved: turning passive into active voice

If like me, you write or enjoy reading action-based fiction, nothing can kill a passage like the over-use of “to-be.” Maybe Shakespare’s Hamlet did ask a critical question, and as a guiding principle for what follows, we’ll answer it with a qualified “not to be.” Passive voice and just being I’m not going to get […]

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