As they did about a year ago, Backspace‘s blog STET! has graced me by re-posting one of my early summer pieces, We Are What We Read. Backspace is a great online writers community with plenty of wise advice, both online and to be had at…

Our community of writers is growing exponentially lately. This summer, besides our lively and vital face to face sessions, I’ve reached beyond the tactile into the virtual world. We’ve had visitors to The Writers Circle blog from as far away as Istanbul and Australia! (You…

(OK… I know that was a corny title!) But Stuart Lutz’s book, The Last Leaf, just got some fantastic coverage. Check out Ends of Eras, a full three web-page “Author Speaks” interview about Stuart and his book in the AARP Bulletin. Congratulations, Stuart. That’s how…

I had a dream last night that my house was crumbling. The front stairway, made of concrete, was so precarious it broke beneath my feet as I tried to mount. The porch displayed its gray, rotted wood in the cloud-light, and the front door was…

OK, this is a quick one, but it’s a lot of fun. An article today in the L.A. Times features a website called “I Write Like” where you can pop in a few paragraphs of text and discover which famous writer your style most resembles.…

Picture taking a baby for its first check-up. The doctor says, “You know, this child has six toes and is missing a finger.” “Doctor, really?” You respond in surprise. All along you’ve seen the extra toe and the missing finger and honestly done your best…

I’m lucky because my boys, ages 6 and 9, still let me read to them each night before bed. They’ve graduated from children’s picture books to novels that develop psyches – Narnia, Harry Potter, the wild, wondrous world of Roald Dahl. Recently I convinced them…

In a revealing email exchange between authors David Gates and Jonathan Lethem posted on the PEN American Center’s website, Lethem bemoans the author’s predicament in the digital age “where the novelists are supposed to shut up and blunder through the dark woods like Salingerian elephants…

Just after I posted yesterday, I got a message from one of our Circle, Marilyn Zion, who recommended a computer app called “Freedom“. She writes: “Have been using “Freedom” for 2 days and wrote straight through from 8:30-12:00 this morning. Didn’t check email or surf…

Apologies for being so delinquent these past two weeks. I’ve been anxiously completing yet another round on my latest novel and couldn’t think of much else until it was done. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve been desperately trying to focus on the latest round…

This is a quick one, but you MUST read Garrison Keillor’s heartfelt, ironic and insightful Op-Ed in today’s New York Times: The End of an Era in Publishing. Times are changing so rapidly that none of us can keep pace. What publishing once was, even…

We all hope and pray that the writing we’ve been slaving away at for weeks, months or years is brilliant, publishable, praiseworthy. Sometimes we’re right. More often than not, it seems, we’re wrong. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re bad writers. I found two links…