One of the questions I get asked a lot at events is a simple one: Who are you reading right now? Or sometimes: Which writers influenced you the most? It’s a perfectly reasonable question. And every time someone asks it, I feel a tiny flash of stress. Maybe more...
A day in the life of a writer is spent in a cabin in the snowy woods. A 1930s Royal typewriter. A bottle of vodka. A thermos of black coffee. A vow not to leave until ten thousand anguished words are hammered out. Feelings oscillate between rapture and suicide. None...
This year blindsided me. Not with tragedy or revelation. Just a quiet, weird fact I had to sit with for a minute. For the first time ever, I made more money as a writer than from anything else in my life. How fucking wild is that? I’ve been writing for nearly...
I’ve always loved Halloween. Always. When I was a kid, there was always that one house in the neighborhood. The one that didn’t just hand out candy, it committed. And it didn't take much back then, as this was the 70s. If a house had flickering lights in the windows...
Every book starts with a question. Sometimes it’s big: what happens when the past catches up with you? How far would you go to protect the truth? But sometimes it’s... different. More like: What’s the best musical instrument case to hide a body in? These are the...
How many of you saw “necessary evil” in the subject line and thought this would be another A.I. rant? Wrong! I’m onto social media now. Years ago, my publicist audited my social-media presence, because that’s a thing. What I was doing right, what needed work, what was...
(Note: This following is best read in the internal voice of an angry old man yelling at kids skateboarding in his driveway.) Goddamnit. A.I. is taking over the world and I hate it. I hate A.I. because, by and large, it makes life easier, and things that are easy don’t...
Hoo, boy. To say I’ve been surprised with the success of Tell Me What You Did is an understatement. It spent about a week as the #1 paperback (of all fiction and non-fiction) on Barnes & Noble and is currently #5 on B&N and in its fifth week on...
First things first: my Halloween theme this year is pirates. Usually my October newsletter is all about my Halloween theme, but I’m running late this year and it’s not even in good-enough shape to take pictures of my decorating progress. If I get some good...
So I’m interviewing Kyle Prue at an event later this month, and he’s written a book called How To Piss off Men. It’s a collection of a bunch of one-liners you can use to upset your special guy. Made me start thinking, what pisses me off? Not too...
