Interview: SUNY GCC

I was interviewed a while ago by the alumni folks at the first college I attended back in 1978! Fub Stuff! Check it out!

Quotes of the Week

Write by the Rails

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
~J.D. Salinger

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
—Robert Frost

The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.
—J. P. Donleavy

Happiness is pursuing work that sustains the spirit.
—Walt Disney

Don’t be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.
—Gene Fowler

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
—Mark Twain

Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators.
—Albert Camus

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.
—Susan Sontag

The beginning is always rewritten much more than the rest…
—Susan Minot

It is the function of art to conceal the difficulties of its execution.
—Susan Sontag

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
—Ernest Hemingway

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.
—George RR Martin

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.
—Frank Herbert

Happy Birthdqy Neil!

I smell a story...

Motivation

Saturday mornings are usually my favorite time to write. I usually wake up at about 5:30am and sneak out of bed (makes my wife love me more).

I usually make coffee while wearing my nightshirt, robe and slippers and in the quiet I crank out a chapter or two in my next novel.

Not today.

I heard last night that one of my friends from school had died. He was 57. Kevin was my brother Eric's best friend. We were a pack of knuckleheads back in the day. We all learned about girls, smoking, drinking, cars, music, movies, work and life together.

I had not seen Kevin in a decade. We emailed infrequently. His health had been failing for year so he didn't travel much anymore. He never seemed to get over my brothers death.

In my short story, The Outer Ring, there is a character based on him. The deep space survey ship The Ventura had a bar on it called Peck's Halfway. Peck was the owner and operator of the place.

I regret not stopping in to visit him my last time visiting home. You always think there will be more time.

Today, I am going to visit a friend. I'm going to hold a baby. I am going to skip ahead and write a sad chapter about loss of a friend, but mostly I'm going to think about Peck. Think about his stupid laugh and his enormous capacity for whiskey and bacon. Think about his face on the other side of the campfire. Think about how scared he was of ghost stories. Think about sitting with him and my brother waiting for trains to just watch them go by.

-- Rest in Peace, Peck. Say hi to Eric for me.

Quotes of the Week

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.
—Neil Gaiman

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
—Frank Capra

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.
—Robert Graves

Everybody has talent. It's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is.
—George Lucas

The only thing that gets me back to directing is good scripts.
—Steven Spielberg

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer.
—Steve Martin

Tell a story! Don’t try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases.
—Anne McCaffrey

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.
—Isabel Allende

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
—Anaïs Nin

I just write what I want to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself.
—J.K. Rowling

NaNoWriMo

I am accidentally doing NaNoWriMo this year. My Third novel, Blood of the Scarecrow, is scheduled to have it's first draft completed by December 1st.

That schedule allows me to complete the second draft during December and then off to beta readers in January.

Final revisions based on their feedback gets it to my professional editor in February.

--March 2016 Release!