A book which informed my entire world view, and still does. Tuchman posits the existance of folly, or the pursuit of public policy contrary to self-interest–in other words, why nations keep shooting themselves in the foot. She uses the Trojans taking the Greek horse inside the walls of Troy as her template …the feasible alternative–that…
[a short story inspired by my father, written for Two of the Deadliest] …landing strips in Bush Alaska weren’t that hard to come by, and he found one mere minutes after he started looking, a pale scar on a leveled-off foothill at the mouth of a canyon carved out by a rushing, unruly creek. There…
No one wanted me to write the Eye of Isis series. Business associates said, “No, no, keep writing Kate Shugak novels, they are what sells.” My agents didn’t want me to write them because they couldn’t sell them without a multi-book contract that included a, you guessed it, Kate Shugak novel or a Liam Campbell…
I wrote the first Eye of Isis novel, Death of an Eye, before I went to Egypt. When it came time to write the second in the series (Disappearance of a Scribe) I knew I had to have a better sense of the Red Land and the Black Land than I could get on YouTube,…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any book you truly love is in need of a properly annotated edition. Here is one such. Let me just start quoting: “…A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!” Mrs. Bennet on Mr. Bingley, of course,…
Read more One cannot ever consider Mr. Collins too presumptuous.
[from “The Perfect Gift,” written for Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, an anthology featuring werewolves at Christmas.] The Alaska state troopers in Anchorage worked out of a five-story rectangular building with a dull gray exterior and an interior cut into matching gray cubicles. Littered surfaces of metal desks were lit by fluorescent tubes, every third or fourth…
Read more “Maybe I just have a sixth sense for big good-looking doofuses.”
Must be Tuesday …ten days from deadline… 4:20a Eyes pop open in realization that expository lump in Chapter 11 is neither informative nor amusing. 4:44a Bitterly acknowledge that there is no getting back to sleep and stagger into the kitchen in search of coffee. 5a Sit down at desk, open book, find section, rewrite, wonder…
[from October 2008] I heard Goodwin talk about this book on NPR, and she sounded like she’d been an eyewitness to the events. Sold me the book. On June 17th–I’ve been a hundred pages from the end for ten days. I don’t want Abe to die. July 17th — Okay, I finally made myself finish.…
[from “Missing, Presumed…” a Liam Campbell short story] ELI SYLVESTER HORRELL, fisher , husband, father, went overboard halfway between Dutch Harbor and the Pribilof Islands. Weather conditions that day in January included fifteen-knot winds and twelve-foot swells. The crew of the JERI A. had seen Horrell go in. In spite of an intensive search by…
When I sold my first multibook contract, back in the Dark Ages, the immediate response from my new publisher was a multipage questionnaire asking me what I would do to help them publicize my books. Would I reach out to local media? Would I do signings? Would I tour? This was so long ago that…
