“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” ~Elmore Leonard Oh Elmore. This is why we love you.

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Thinking last night about how hard it is to work up the courage to chase a dream–and keep chasing it for the distance. Every which way you turn, there are people with discouraging words, eager to point out why you can’t do what you want to do. Don’t listen to them. It’s their own lives they’re really talking about, not yours.

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I love cover art. I love design. Even bad cover art fascinates me. I sometimes browse bookstores just looking at the covers, considering what works for me and what doesn’t. To turn my obsession into something useful, I’m going to do a series of posts on cover art. Some other day, I’ll get serious and talk in some detail about the process my books go through to get their covers. But for today, I have a funny story. Harlequin mailed […]

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To anyone whose creative process is a clean, methodical, straight-forward matter, you can ignore this post (also, I hate you). To everyone else, I want to put forward a theory. We mostly think of creative talent as something that can be improved steadily. Say, you write a book. It sucks. But you learn from it, and the next book you write comes out better. You learn from that one too, and your third book is even better than the second. […]

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I was talking to a friend yesterday about the business of publishing and mentioned that it took me five years and six manuscripts to sell my first book. It’s occurred to me later though that we never stop trying to get published. It’s not as if, once you achieve the goal of selling your first book, you forever stay in that elusive state we called “published.” Instead, it’s a struggle we continue for as long as we aspire to get […]

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I’m going through a blah reading period right now, where nothing is grabbing me and making me want to stay up late to find out what happens next. I’m listening to the audio version of Shantaram on my iPod, and I have various half-finished books next to my bed, but everything’s leaving me feeling kind of lukewarm. What’s the last thing you read that grabbed you and wouldn’t let go? And what are you reading right now?

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