Just put the (almost) finishing touches on the new material being added to the upcoming reissue of my Discovering Japan short story collection, due out in December. This new version features a new cover, one additional unpublished short story, and THREE (count ’em, three!) sections from the Work In Progress, aka “The Witch Novel”. Stay […]

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What is there to say on any of this anymore? The days come and go, I write a bit or I don’t, I practice flamenco or I don’t, I garden or I don’t. None of it is very interesting. This is not to say there haven’t been good moments. Socially distanced picnics and cocktails have […]

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I’m 475 words away from hitting 30,000 this year and, at the risk of invoking the displeasure of the gods, I’m relatively certain that I can manage that before midnight on December 31st. Roughly half of them will be for the Witch Novel, bringing me to almost 62,000 for that project. I had some breakthroughs […]

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A number of year’s ago, after reading Sarah Susanka’s book The Not-So-Big Life, I adopted a year-end ritual that involves asking myself some questions from the book about what I learned, achieved, and failed to do in the previous year.  I’d then set out my goals for the new year.  I now have over ten […]

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Halloween may be over but you haven’t missed your chance to score this incredible Story Bundle offer.  Seriously, you can’t go wrong.  Just $15 gets you: Experimental Film. Gemma Files’ Shirley Jackson award winner. One of the most highly praised horror novels of the last few years. October. A novella by Michael Rowe about the […]

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Last year, the good folks at the ChiSeries readings decided to banish the August doldrums by having local writers read from some of their earliest attempts at fiction.  The laughter was so loud that everyone promptly agreed that we needed another evening of writer humiliation in 2018 and it’s almost upon us. Mark your calendars […]

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Just signed off on the proofs for the reprint of my story “Consent” for the new anthology Fright into Flight.  I’m very happy that this story will have a new life and share space with such incredible writers as Gemma Files and Nadia Bulkin.  You can preorder your copy at the link. Here’s my intro […]

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Well, I’m a bit behind on this, as expected. No, I did not expect to write a novel during November. However, I did use the National Novel Writing Month period to try to get as many words down as possible while I was working on Cold Hillside. I never managed more than about 10,000 – […]

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Not very original, but hey, I’ve been sick.  We spent 10 days in California and returned to fever, weird dreams about Escher bodies, architecture and Hillary Clinton. First stop: San Francisco.  We went to a distillery in a old airplane hangar, to Alcatraz, to a free museum full of arcade games, to the Japanese Tea […]

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To keep my writing muscles working while I’m suspended in “I’ve written everything that I know happens and now must actually develop a world and a plot” mode, I’m doing writing exercises. I’ve just started on the ones featured in Ursula K. LeGuin’s wonderful book Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the […]

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