Browsing all posts in Featured.
The Big Mistake In My Hated New Thriller: Forgetting To Show, Not Tell
When I read this recent essay by Stephen King yesterday — IMAGERY AND THE THIRD EYE — I realized one of the reasons I hate the thriller I am trying to finish. I’m sick of it. The main reason I hate the process is that I originally wrote most of the book more than 25 […]
Amsterdam: A Killer City At 400
I have left more bodies strewn along the streets and alleys of Amsterdam and in her canals than any other city in the world. I love Amsterdam. Most of my books have been translated into Dutch. And though the Dutch market — like the overall population of The Netherlands — is relatively small, I’m […]
Amazon Falling Into Legacy Publishing Mindset
I am caught in a frustrating war between Google and Amazon. I’ve previously written about the indie author’s love/late relationship with Amazon (Amazon’s Indie Author Cracks Begin To Show, Grow) but have struggled over the past few months to make the relationship work. But over those months, Amazon has steadily slipped into the same sort […]
No Vaginas Allowed!
Christian publishers and book stores have a problem with vaginas. Maybe the owners were all born by Caesarean section or there are a lot more messiahs running around than we ever imagined. We guys who have assisted with the birth of our children know it’s a painful, messy (and awesome) process, which is why […]
Ku Klux Klan Taliban & The Evil of Muslim Silence
In my last two books I spent a lot of time wrestling with the issue of God, faith and why good people do bad things — or allow evil to continue. Why did good Germans tolerate Nazi atrocities? Why did good Southern white people tolerate the Ku Klux Klan and institutionalized racism, lynchings and other […]
Giant Legacy Publishers Screw Libraries: Only Amazon Can Stop Them
Big publishers are screwing public libraries, but here’s an idea how Amazon could put a stop to them — and help readers, authors and itself at the same time. PROBLEM #1: Some big publishers — Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin — refuse to sell any ebooks to libraries. The excerpt below, from an open […]
It’s Not Orange, It’s Persimmon, Damnit!
CLICK IMAGE BELOW TO MAKE IT INTERACTIVE This article from The Atlantic: It’s Not Pink, It’s Fuchsia: Women Like Complex Names for Their Colors got me to thinking about describing colors in my writing. According to The Atlantic article: Stephen Von Worley used data from an XKCD color survey, where more than 5 million users […]
We Are All Salman Rushdie In The War Against Radical Islam
Amid the lurid insanity of Islamists rioting and killing over insults, we forget that the leading powers of political Islam as practiced today have been trying to kill Salman Rushdie for 23 years now. Not over a sophomoronic attempt at a video, but because he wrote The Satanic Verses — a remarkably well written and […]
Bless The Dutch Libraries!
The Netherlands is a small country, but my books have always been popular there. However, I didn’t expect to get a check for $240.12 as payment for copies of Daughter of God that had been lent by libraries! Thank goodness that my agent, Natasha Kern, managed to keep foreign rights when the book was sold […]
Anti-Muslim Film Obscures Real Islamist Evils
The biggest problem with a crude video like the “Innocence of Muslims” is that it obscures a rational, fact-based discussion of the very real evils underpinning today’s Islamist movement. Sam Bacile’s badly done, incendiary polemic provokes a psychological reaction that discourages critical thinking. It encourages some people to dismiss the valid evils of current-day Islamists. […]
