Why We Love It When Cute/Funny Characters Find Themselves in Horrifying Situations
With the recent premier of Stranger Things 2, I thought I'd take a moment to write about my favorite sub-genre. As far as I know it doesn't have an official…
The Cat Odyssey
What follows is the true story of my attempt to reunite a cat with his owners, an epic quest that rivals The Odyssey, Gilgamesh and (at times) Dante’s Inferno.…
An Overlooked Talent Necessary to Become a Successful Author
There are countless talents that an author needs in order to be successful. Just to name a few, there is: creativity, a comfort with language, an ability to form single…
12 Strategies to Find Time To Write Your Novel
Since we’ve nearly reached May and summer isn’t that far off (a time when our schedules fill up with cookouts, road trips and family obligations) I thought I would write…
4 Types of Novel Outlines: When to Use Them and When to Treat Them Like The Plague
(Just for the record, I used an outline to write this blog about outlines. So there’s that.) We live in such overwhelmingly controversial times but somehow whether or not…
So I Quit My Job at an Investment Company to Become a Novelist
JUST TO GIVE YOU SOME BACKGROUND…. Between December 2009 and September 2016, I worked at T. Rowe Price, an asset management firm located in the Baltimore area. I joined…
A Vital Lesson In Becomming a Novelist: How to Survive the Slings and Arrows of Constructive Criticism
Most of us write our novels in isolation. The story originates in our heads, and then we write and edit while secluded in our bedrooms, backyards, offices and basements. …
10 Things I Learned From “The Novel Year,” A Class At the Bethesda Writer’s Center
This past year I enrolled in a class called "The Novel Year" at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD. The purpose of this class (as you might be able to…
Puppet show on brown background
My Sock Puppet Show Has Potental To Be More Culturally Significant Than Your Opera.
When I was in seventh grade one of our school librarians (the scary one) implied that the only comic book with any artistic merits was Maus by Art Spiegelman. …