A Day in the Life
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...
The Year Things Changed
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...
Scream-Reel Fail
I pride myself on making kids scream. That’s my thing. Every Halloween, I turn my garage into a chamber of psychological warfare, complete with fog, lights, eerie soundscapes, and strategically timed jump scares. I spend weeks fine-tuning it, because nothing brings me...
Becoming the Scary House
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...
An Ode to My Agent
I’ve been posting blogs for seven years (my very first was September 2017) and it dawned on me recently: I’ve never written an essay about my agent. Which is weird, because Pam (Ahearn) has been in my life for 21 years. Hell, that’s longer than most marriages. I found...
The Power of Showing Up
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...
Don’t Check My Search History
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...
Still a Panster?
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...
A Necessary Evil
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...
Why I Hate A.I.
(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...
