Yesterday, I attended my first meeting of the Liberty States Fiction Writers at Edison Library, NJ.

They're a friendly bunch. My fellow New Jersey Authors' Network member, Helen Henderson, gave a great talk on blurring the lines between plotting and pantsing. Afterwards, award-winning author, Lois Winston, gave an excellent roundtable persentation ( Read more... )

At Saturday's GSHW meeting, I met Don D'Auria, editor of Samhain publishing's new horror line, Samhain Horror.

Among the many thought provoking facts and figures he gave out during his talk, I was particularly interested in this one: eBooks now account for 50% of fiction books sold. No doubt, the percentage refers to quantity, as opposed to ( Read more... )

I've had to miss the last two meetings due to other commitments, but I'm looking forward to this month's GSHW  get-together at East Brunswick Library (Saturday, July 9th).

I last saw our guest speaker, Lawrence Connolly, back in 2008. He gave an interesting and most entertaining talk on building tension in writing. This time, he's doing a talk on  ( Read more... )

After a gruelling week spent preparing tax returns and on other, non-writerly, activities, I'm very much looking forward to today's GSHW meeting at East Brunswick Library.


( Read more... )

I'm looking forward to tomorrow evening, when I'll be at the Monmouth County Library (HQ), Manalapan, with four other writers (WALT ECKLOF, LEE BARWOOD, HELEN HENDERSON and fellow GSHW member, NEIL MORRIS) for a New Jersey Authors' Network Q&A Panel called:

What did they ever do to you? Or... Why all Writers are Sadists

Kick-off's at 7:00pm

It's ( Read more... )

Aside from working on Dead Doris, I've got lots of exciting stuff happening this month:

February 5th: QUIZ NEWS
This coming Saturday is the closing date for those wishing to risk their sanity by braving the twisted logic and excruciating puns featured in  THE 2nd CUNNING, CRYPTIC, CLUE, CONUNDRUM, THING. If you haven't yet taken a stab at it, be ( Read more... )

I'm looking forward to this Saturday's GSHW meeting at East Brunswick Library, NJ08816. It's a one-hour workshop on reading your work aloud, conducted by Hildy Silverman (aka hildy9595), editor of Space And Time Magazine, and Neal Levin (aka dqg_neal) owner of Dark Quest Books.

I did my first ever reading last November, at PhilCon, where I read a passage from Fur- ( Read more... )

I enjoyed the GSHW meeting at East Brunswick library earlier this month. Our guest speaker, Will Horner (editor of Fantasist Enterprises), gave a talk called Two Major Pitfalls in the Revision Process.

He shared plenty of good advice (if you're a GSHW member, you'll be able to hear it all on a podcast at the group's website soon), but his thoughts ( Read more... )

Got to the Crowne Plaze hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, about an hour ago for this year's PhilCon. As I unloaded my car, a 17-yr-old girl managed to turn her car into the kerb, knackering the front, passenger wheel.

Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but it's not the kind of thing I need to see right now, what with my son taking his driving lessons and ( Read more... )

I love knock-knock jokes, so I made up one to start off my blogging presentation for the Greater Lehigh Valley Writing Group next weekend.  I tried it out on Senior Management, who promptly forbade me to use it, so I thought I'd post it here instead (CAUTION: You should probably hold onto your sides before reading any further).

"Knock, knock!"

"Who's ( Read more... )