Last month I shared a Day in the Life of a Writer, and more than one of you followed up with questions about writing an hour a day and whether that’s actually enough to finish a book. It is. And it works. Just do the math. If you write for an hour and average...
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...
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...
Writers are fucking weird. That’s probably why I love talking to them so much. We’re solitary by nature, prone to obsession, usually carrying a few psychological idiosyncrasies that we’ve either turned into art or denial. But sit two of us down with...
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...
Here’s how I usually write books. I don’t pitch them. I don’t outline them. I don’t (usually) send early pages to my agent. My editor often has no idea what I’m working on until the manuscript shows up in her inbox, fully formed, bleeding from the corners. It’s not...
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...
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...
Twenty-one years ago, it was my brand-new agent who told me I had written a thriller. Cool! I thought. Followed by, what’s a thriller? I had no business writing a book. I had no training. No English degree. Knew nothing about books other than I enjoyed...
Happy New Year! My new thriller, Tell Me What You Did, will be out on January 28. This is an angry, scary book that’s gotten a lot of pre-release attention—more so than any of my earlier nine releases—and I can’t wait to see what happens with it. Like most of my...
