I started a new novel last Monday, June 1. Today I completed the eleventh chapter and am about 9000 words in. This is the first time I have tried to write without an outline, but I felt I was ready. After seven novels, seven novellas, and sixteen screenplays, I think I have the basic…

Why do writers need literary agents? Back when I was writing screenplays, my experience was that to get an agent, somebody had to want to buy your script. But nobody would be open to reading your script unless it was submitted to them by an agent. That’s a Joseph Heller classic Catch-22. It is different…

Now that the Kôld Septology is completed, I hope to roll out all seven books, one at a time, over the next year or so. I self-published the first two some time ago (it has been a 19-year project, after all). The first had a lovely cover of Benjamin ice surfing, created by Sabrina Silver, the…

I first read The Hobbit when I was fifteen. Even though I was a reader, I had avoided Tolkien because the kids at Sequoia High School who liked him were hippies who danced around in the woods. A friend of my brother, Conrad Praetzel, whom I greatly admired because he was older and played the…

Welcome! Have you ever read a story and thought, “I wish I had written that?” For me, it began in sixth grade when our teacher Ada Stroud read to us at the end of every school day. She introduced us to Stephen Meader–I think it was “Boy with a Pack”–and then she read us “A…