Swords, Specters, & Stuff
Welcome to My World
I started this blog in January 2012 for one simple reason: I love to write. I named it “Swords, Specters, & Stuff” because I especially love to write about writing, about books and movies in my favorite genres, about authors that mean a great deal to me. But there’s more to it than that, which is why I included “Stuff” in the title. It is “Stuff” that gives me carte blanche to write about anything, which is why you’ll see stories about special trips to Cooperstown, Sedona, and other places; about getting older; about baseball; about the otherworldly way in which I met my soul mate; about the loss of good friends, and so much more. Enjoy! And feel free to leave a comment.
Guilty Pleasures: Godzilla (1998)
I watched Godzilla (2014) last week. Perhaps I’ll write about it another time. Quick assessment: not bad, kind of dark—literally and figuratively. A lot of exposition long before you ever see either Godzilla or a MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism). But...
“I’m Your Number One Fan”
That line, and Stephen King’s Misery—which I wrote about last week—are apparently inseparable. In the hope of finding some more material I entered “writers’ number one fans” into a search engine, and guess what: the first four links that show up are for Misery and...
Films About Writers: Misery
Authors, athletes, actors—heck, just about everyone in the public eye—all have a Number One Fan. Or two. Or a thousand. Even I had some Number One Fans back in the day. Sounds like an interesting topic for a post—which will appear next week. Today we’ll talk about...
Common Writing Mistakes
In my centuries of evaluating and editing manuscripts I’ve probably been through five million of ’em. (Wait, I’m not supposed to exaggerate; it’s only one million.) With that large a sample size it’s clear that many of the same mistakes plague writers, whether they’re...
Guilty Pleasures: Conan The Destroyer
Over two years ago I wrote a “Guilty Pleasures” post for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first screen romp as Conan the Barbarian in 1982. Since that time this particular post has received more views than any of the others I’ve done on my blog. Must be a lot of Conan—or...
“Chilled Monkey Brains”
Memorable lines from our favorite movies are always a hoot. Here are a few more of mine. “Ah, dessert! Chilled monkey brains.” A dinner guest at one of the funniest and most disgusting meals you’ll ever witness grosses out Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in Indiana Jones...
Myths And Legends: Haunted Anza Borrego
Years ago, when I set my ghost story, Fire Dance, in the Anza Borrego Desert east of San Diego, I had no idea just how haunted this bleak landscape actually was. Well, I do now. The following stories are courtesy of the Paranormalistics, a highly trained team of...
Films About Writers: Finding Forrester
We writers don’t usually find cause to save the country, or the planet, or the galaxy (except in our own stories), so making us the heroes up on the silver screen is not something that gets box office-driven Hollywood all atwitter. That said, there are more movies...
Guilty Pleasures: Deep Rising
Not having felt “guilty” for a while, I dug way down into the well of duds for this 1998 action-horror flick. I mean, how could I not like a movie co-starring Famke Janssen (X-Men’s Jean Grey and a Bond villain in GoldenEye) and a bunch of giant, multi-tentacled sea...
Trimming The Fat From Your Manuscript
We writers tend to fall in love with our words—sometimes too much. As a writing coach and editor for decades I have been personally responsible for millions of words of unnecessary exposition being excised from my writers’ manuscripts—usually with those writers...
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