Authors Electric

Like you, I play many parts in the writing of a book: part plotter, part pantser, part craftsman, part laborer, part artist, and part klutz. And I accept myself as all of those. But so far I've never been able to see myself as a gifted promoter--or even a mildly competent one. When I finished a book, I moved on to the next with half-hearted touts on Facebook and Twitter/X. I've steered clear of giveaway events as well as interviews. My shyness or aversion stems, I think, from my Catholic upbringing--where the flames of hell were never far from shameless self-promotion.  But in the six years spent on my WIP, I learned some exciting new narrative footwork. Result: a new kind of crime thriller unlike anything else I've done. Ans I've developed a burning ambition to share this book with readers I've never managed to reach. And this will require mastering new footwork once again--this time in marketing and self-promotion. For months I've worked on expanding and stren...

  Warning: a true tale, in its own way, of my appalling biker past. She was waiting for me, God knew where. Her name, I believed, was Elvira. I'd barely glimpsed her in Seattle when she split with a biker the size of The Rock and flipped me the bird on the way. I felt a story coming, but not one I could write as a writer whose only bike had been a Schwinn. But then one night, at 3:00 a.m., I awoke from a dream of Elvira with what I thought was a rocking idea: what if Elvira waited in not one town but two? You could blame Lee Child for the idea about two rival towns. After all, he'd written Nothing to Lose , a tale about two rival Colorado towns with just twelve miles between them. But I blame myself for the goddess perched upon that Harley, daring me to find her and teasing me with the riddle of her role in the two sites, She'd have nothing to do with a loser who considered ripping off Lee Child, his setting and cool plotline. Hell, everyone rips off Lee Child--who ripped o...

Writers may come in all sizes and shapes...and some shapes are stranger than others. But in the end they all belong in one of two great camps. FIRST CAMP First off, you have the outliners. Their argument is simple: a  book is a journey and you can't get There till you know every Here on the way. P. G.Wodehouse's outlines ran to to 30,000 words and were done on index cards mounted all over the walls. Horror writer John Saul's outlines may reach a hundred pages while John Grisham's run to fifty. Even Tom Wolfe once lamented that one of his books took a decade to write because, with no outline, he found himself lost. And we can be certain that Virgil had an outline for the Aeneid: an epic divided into two parts of six Books each, with each part containing the same number of lines. SECOND CAMP But the other camp is as large and as loud: non-outliners who insist on going with the flow--letting the book, as it were, write itself...sometimes on rolls of paper...

There are so many faces of the Buddha that it's more than a bit silly when somebody gets in your face about one: the beaming, Christ-like pacifist. And when critics condemn works of art that are false to the face they prefer...things grow worse. For the Buddha has so many faces. Second only to the PPS (Perfectly Passive Saint) is the PPA (Playful Party Animal). There are also images of the Angry Buddha, reminding us that Christ himself flew into a rage at one temple: Even the Buddha acknowledged the humanity of anger: And it should be obvious that not all Buddhists are Perfectly Passive, as this image attests: And these: Recently, though, I was taken to task for a short but graphic passage in my first piece of flash fiction. My antihero had learned just enough martial arts to deal with a thug on the street--ultimately learning that he knew a lot more than he thought. The short-short was character-driven, with an inevitable path to the end. Yet a dear ...