Over the past few years, I have been a guest on several radio and podcast shows, discussing topics such as writing fiction and the craft of writing in general. I posted the first two of those interviews for the past two. Today, I am posting Part 3. I hope you …
Over the past few years, I have been a guest on several radio and podcast interviews discussing topics such as writing fiction and writing in general. I am posting those interviews as a three-part series for the next couple of days. I hope you find these posts interesting and, most …
Over the past few years, I have been a guest on several radio and podcast interviews discussing topics such as writing fiction and writing in general. I am posting those interviews as a three-part series for the next couple of days. I hope you find these posts interesting and, most …
For the past 13 years, Chicago has had the dubious distinction of being the murder capital of America. And here are a few more ominous facts about “That Toddlin’ Town:” For seven consecutive years, Chicago has had the highest murder rate among U.S. cities with more than one million people. …
During a recent “virtual book tour” with several book bloggers, I was asked what three things I learned while writing the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy. It was a good question because it prompted me to pause and reflect on the fiction-writing process in a way I had never done before. …
At a book signing during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books a while back, where I was promoting my Finding Billy Battles trilogy, I was asked several times about the research process for writing historical fiction novels. I explained that researching the first book …
I am often asked what the most significant challenges were for me as I wrote the Finding Billy Battles trilogy. The trilogy falls into the Historical Fiction genre, and believe me, the challenges when writing historical fiction are many. Addressing them all in one post would be problematic. So I …
Like hundreds of thousands of other Californians, I am about to lose representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. That will occur if voters decide this November 4 to accept Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “Election Rigging Response ” scheme to undermine California’s independent Citizens Redistricting Commission and gerrymander congressional district maps …
One early summer day in 1959, when I was about 14, I was working on my cousin’s farm in Kansas, loading hay bales. After maybe two hours of heaving 60-pound alfalfa bales onto a flatbed trailer as it was pulled along by a Farmall IH tractor, we took a break. …
When I was in the U.S. Army in the 1960s, one of the most persistent exhortations from my superiors was: “The only good communist is a dead communist.” Our job, we were told during basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, MO, and even during my advanced training in signals intelligence …