A writer’s life
-
No thesis statements allowed
As a writer of non-fiction and a teacher of expository of writing, especially writing about fiction, I believe in thesis statements, have thought a lot about how to write them, and tried to teach high school students to do the same. A thesis statement in the context of a literary essay is a claim about…
-
First Date
My days, twenty-three days and twenty-seven chapters into this novel, are settling into a routine which I hope I can maintain. At 25,000 words, I am perhaps one-third of the way through the first draft (each first draft chapter is written and rewritten and then polished). I mentioned last time that I began each daily…
-
15,000 words in . . .
I began this new novel (working title is Ordinary Life) with a plan to write it the way Dean Koontz does. For years I’ve shown my students Dean Koontz videos in which he describes his writing process. He begins with some notion, then starts with the first page and revises that first page perhaps twenty…
-
A new novel
I started a new novel last Monday, June 1. Today I completed the eleventh chapter and am about 9000 words in. This is the first time I have tried to write without an outline, but I felt I was ready. After seven novels, seven novellas, and sixteen screenplays, I think I have the basic…
-
Querying
Why do writers need literary agents? Back when I was writing screenplays, my experience was that to get an agent, somebody had to want to buy your script. But nobody would be open to reading your script unless it was submitted to them by an agent. That’s a Joseph Heller classic Catch-22. It is different…
-
An illustrator for the new edition of “Benjamin and the Paradise Project”
Now that the Kôld Septology is completed, I hope to roll out all seven books, one at a time, over the next year or so. I self-published the first two some time ago (it has been a 19-year project, after all). The first had a lovely cover of Benjamin ice surfing, created by Sabrina Silver, the…
-
Homage to Tolkien
I first read The Hobbit when I was fifteen. Even though I was a reader, I had avoided Tolkien because the kids at Sequoia High School who liked him were hippies who danced around in the woods. A friend of my brother, Conrad Praetzel, whom I greatly admired because he was older and played the…
-
A new author website
Welcome! Have you ever read a story and thought, “I wish I had written that?” For me, it began in sixth grade when our teacher Ada Stroud read to us at the end of every school day. She introduced us to Stephen Meader–I think it was “Boy with a Pack”–and then she read us “A…