My thoughts and ideas on various topics, including advice about writing and getting published.
Which task would you rather do, one someone directs you to perform, or one you dreamed up on your own? Answer that question honestly, and you’ll understand why in his book Drive, author Daniel H. Pink argues Autonomy provides us with a powerful motivator for our work. As we previewed in our introduction, along with […]
Is the Internet as we know it about to come to an end? If you read a lot of the online discussion on the topic of Internet Neutrality and pending FCC rule changes that will undo it, you would think so. What impact will this have for us average Joes? To appreciate this, we first […]
What drives you to Write? Where do you find motivation to write and keep writing? If I had to answer this question left to my own devices, I would offer some touchy feely reply about letting my imagination fly, coming up with interesting concepts for my stories, the ability to create worlds like ours or […]
Have you noticed how most stories you read or watch have fewer women than men? Does it bother you that in a world where women actually outnumber men (OK, by a small margin) most stories treat them as a by-the-way minority? How do our stories suffer when we tell them in a world nearly devoid […]
Should you write what you know? Have you frozen to a stop when facing a topic or story because you realize how little you know? Do you fear that writing only what you know will limit your writing? A recent blog post by a fellow writer caused me to consider these questions anew. You can […]
I used to ask what made a great storytelling photograph. Now I ask a similar question about written stories, and the answer keeps coming back with 4 Cs: Concept, Characters, Conflict and Context. I’ve heard a lot of broad arguments for what makes a great story, what makes it real and relatable, but for me […]
How do you discover interesting characters for your fiction? They’re everywhere! For instance… I had an awesome taxi ride last night. I sat in the front seat and chatted up this amazingly gregarious Lebanese guy. We traded immigrant stories, but it was mostly him talking a mile a minute, his franctic speech a perfect match […]
Now that Pink Ballerina has hit the beach, I wanted to let you know that along with DEAD BEEF and soon-to-be-released Decisive Moment, and a couple of other stories and novels I’m still developing, they will portray Our Cyber World, a series of parallelequels. To see how this is going to work out, let’s talk […]
Most of my fiction fits in the suspense/thriller genre. This means I keep my chapters short, to the point and for the most part, fast. Still, I slow things down to give the reader a breather and my characters space to develop. Whether I’m writing my own work or reading someone else’s a certain level […]
During my pursuit of photography and writing, I’ve come face to face with how superficial my life — and dare I say modern life in general — can be. In short, I’ve relearned what I used to know intuitively as a child: that I live in a wonderful world full of beauty I can only […]
