These are all the novels I read in 2020.
On November 30th, the day after my oldest son left home to join the Marines, I noticed a padded yellow envelope on his desk.
The other day I was looking at my website analytics and noticed an interesting data point. There was a huge spike in the number of hits on June 22nd–over a hundred people visited my website.
I can’t believe this is happening. Can you?
Sometime in January, the universe sneezed, our space-time continuum shifted, and our metaverse got switched with another. Somehow we got stuck in someone else’s pandemic novel. Or this is proof we’re all living a simulation, like Neo, and somebody with a warped sense of humor introduced a new glitch in the Matrix. I guess it depends on whether you like getting your stories from books or movies. I’m a writer. I like books. I also like cool sci-fi movies. Don’t make me choose favorites.
Last week I saw a viral post going around on Twitter. Of course, I read it–and found nothing in the letter to support her accusation. What I read was a heart-felt letter of support from a devout Christian to his Hobby Lobby employees.
Earlier this year in May, I ran across a homework assignment in my son’s state-mandated, eighth grade sex-ed curriculum that infuriated me.
A few interesting things have happened in the past few months since I published my last blog post: 1. Obnoxious emails that appear to be sent from my own email address, the one I use to query literary agents, began filling up my spam folder.
I did a DuckDuckGo search for the words “when is a final draft finished novel” (I try to avoid Google) and found, at the top of the search results, a class offered by the Iowa Summer Writing Festival titled The Final Draft: On Finishing and Knowing When You’ve Finished Your Novel. In other words, the answer to this innocuous question is valuable enough to be turned into a commodity that can be exchanged in the free market for money, like pork bellies.
As a parent of two children, I read Ms. Szalai’s review of Senator Ben Sasse’s book The Vanishing American Adult because I want to raise my kids to become responsible, self-reliant adults. I did not expect a condescending, political diatribe.
In the September Pub Rants blog post from Nelson Literary Agency, “9 Story Openings to Avoid, Part 4,” they posed a fun challenge to craft a brief opening scene from these six lines of dialogue…