Sources of my novels, stories, and other writings
Suppose you have a beta reader. (In my experience, all beta readers are invaluable. Some throw you straight fastballs, some curveballs, some changeups or sliders, some sweepers or screwballs. Doesn’t matter. They’re all priceless in their own way.) In this case, a reader who absorbs your latest tome and opines about the novel’s main female […]
Girl Next Door or Deadly Vixen? In Pursuit of My Femme Fatale Fox Read More »
Those we knew before, faded now from our present lives, but not our memory. Faces, personalities, living spirits still so vivid in our minds they could step before us in the next instant without causing a second glance, a single eyeblink: “Oh, there your are. You’ve been gone awhile, but now you’re back, as if
Ghost Faces of the Past Meeting Imagined Ones of the Present Read More »
The Cold War novels I’ve read (you know the ones I mean: with their Ivy League and Oxford spies and nondescript moles, with their black or tangerine or whatever color ops, and with that endless line of flirty girls with their red-painted lips and brass-and-leather-strapped suitcases slipping behind East German or Soviet lines to work
SOLDIER IN GERMANY: Sleeping With Armageddon in Cold War Europe Read More »
Having lived in New Orleans for over a decade—those years of stumbling up and down the broken, midnight-hour cobblestone streets and secret pathways; the array of characters and endless meld of voices encountered; the archeological layers of decaying artifact amid ghostly generation, reaching back to its primeval mud, cut in twain by that great river;
Writing the Underbelly of New Orleans Read More »
If you look at a map of Southern Italy, you see the spur of the boot (too high-backed to be of use to a working cowboy) sticking some forty miles out into the Adriatic Sea. And in the center of this spur is the dark and looming Monte Gargano where, in the year 493, a
ORIGINS OF A TITLE, or: FRENCH QUARTERS is Not Just About the French Quarter Read More »
Another story from my Tales of the Late Twentieth Century is one entitled “The Blue Light.” With the previously mentioned “Point Arena” it forms a sort of duology, fictionalizing at least one perspective of my military experience. This pair of stories may be the closest thing I would refer to as autobiographical; although, as a
In my short story collection Tales of the Late Twentieth Century is one entitled “Point Arena”. It is written in a somewhat fragmented, episodic, almost collage-like style that mirrors (at least, in my own mind) what it was like being a young soldier stationed at a very remote and isolated Northern-California radar station in the
In Germany, at the height of the terrorist alerts, and during the most ferocious snowstorm I had yet witnessed there, we went on deployment again. The sirens rang at two a.m.; the alert drivers stumbled from their bunks, got dressed like unhappy Eskimos in their fur-lined parkas, hopped in their jeeps, and drove out every
A Story I Never Believed Read More »
Terrorism was as much a part of my time in Germany as warm beer. There was the Red Army Faction (RAF), otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionäre Zellen, or RZ), and other splinter groups, copycat wannabes, until it became hard to keep track of who was blowing up whom. My German
When I was a boy, my family moved to a dilapidated old fishing camp, north of San Francisco and at the south end of the Napa Valley, called Cuttings Wharf. I never went back after we moved away, but I would guess the place is only a memory now. However, when we arrived there, in