A couple of things occurred to me while I was watching the World Baseball Classic championship game last week between the United States and Venezuela. The game was being played at the Florida Marlins stadium in Miami, which, when I last checked, was an American city. Yet, judging from the …
If there is one thing most authors have in common, besides the sheer agony that sometimes accompanies the writing process, it is the dreaded Rejection Letter from an agent or publisher. I don’t know who got this one from Harlequin, but it had to be devastating for whoever received it. …
There is an old adage that says “any publicity is good publicity–even if it is bad.” Why? Because the objective is to get people talking about you and your book. If you are like me, you don’t believe a lot of the negative reviews I see on sites like Amazon, …
Recently, I heard the news that Iran may try to destroy California with drones. I had to laugh at that. Aren’t the Iranians aware that Supreme Leader Gavin Newsom and his gang of socialist Democrats have already done that? Don’t they know that the state’s 39 million serfs, aka inhabitants, …
The third book in my Finding Billy Battles trilogy begins in the early 1900s, and I find myself still deeply immersed in the lifestyle and routine of that period. Because my central character, William Battles, is (among other things) a journalist who spends time covering (and participating in) conflicts in …
(In June 2020, I posted the following column about Hong Kong. The reason for the post was that on May 22 of that year, China’s government in Beijing announced that it would allow mainland state security agencies to operate officially in Hong Kong, effectively allowing Beijing to impose national security …
The other day, I watched Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries blathering on about recently fired Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noam. Jeffries was ecstatic. In fact, he seemed to be salivating as he tore into Noem’s damaged political carcass. “Good riddance,” Jeffries snarled. “Noem was an unhinged, out-of-control, pathological …
At the request of a faithful follower, today I am re-posting a column that appeared a while back in The Economist, one of the U.K.’s most prestigious magazines. Written by an unnamed foreign correspondent, it takes a sardonic and self-effacing view of foreign correspondents by suggesting that Harry Flashman, Victorian …
(Occasionally, I like to repost my piece on Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” the classic book that lampoons foreign correspondents. I first read Scoop in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in March 1975 as Communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas surrounded the besieged city. Day after day, the Khmer Rouge bombarded the city with 107mm Chinese-made …
Last week, I posted a column discussing a new movement in the U.K. designed to “Restore Britain”—meaning to restore Great Britain’s traditions and values, which are under assault by a deluge of third-world migration, both legal and illegal. The founder of that movement, a former Member of Parliament named Rupert …