by mike | Oct 6, 2014 | Aging, Baseball, Death, Life, Uncategorized, Writing |
My dad, Murray Sirota, passed away at age fifty-nine in 1969, when I was just a mere slip of a lad—more or less. We knew it would happen; a couple of months earlier he’d been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, the end result of a lifetime of cigarette smoking, and...
by mike | Sep 29, 2014 | Books, Historical Novels, Publishing, Research, Uncategorized, Writing |
There is a disturbing true story behind the events depicted in The Hammer of Witches, a newly published historical novel by Basque scholar and good friend, Begoña Echeverria, one of my long-time writers. After a brief synopsis, I’ll have Begoña tell that story. In...
by mike | Sep 23, 2014 | Guilty Pleasures, Horror Movies, Movies, Uncategorized |
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...
by mike | Sep 15, 2014 | Books, Bookstores, Native Americans, Nightmares, Uncategorized, Writers' Retreat, Writing |
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...
by mike | Sep 8, 2014 | Books, Horror, Horror Movies, Movies, Psychological Thrillers, Uncategorized, Writing |
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...
by mike | Aug 25, 2014 | Books, Editing, Publishing, Uncategorized, Writing |
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...
