We crime writers love to cast bankers as our villains. They’ve got money, so who’s going to have any sympathy for them? And they make us grovel when we go in for a car loan.



I cast a banker as my villain in my thumb novel, Iced, last year. I had him running an investment scam.



Fellow crime writer Mike Manno – we’re both published by Five Star – climbed aboard the anti-banker bus this year with… Continue

For fans of William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor mystery series – and I’m one of them – Krueger announced big news on his website this month. He won’t retire Cork as he said he would a year and a half ago.



Krueger wanted time to write a big stand-alone thriller that would get him a movie contract. To get that time, he said back then, Cork had to go, that Heaven’s Keep, his ninth book in the series… Continue

Amazon and Barnes & Noble have the hog’s share of the e-book market.



Yes, you can buy your e-books directly from the electronic book publishers – most of them small houses – but if you want Stephen King’s or Mary Higgins Clark’s latest book in digital, and those of other top-selling writers, you go to Amazon or B&N.



Now, though – as of this month – you can buy your e-books from Borders’ electronic bookstore. The company hopes to get 17 percent of the total e-book… Continue

If more of us writers are getting out there with more books, those of us who survive in this business and profit, says Neil Gaiman, are those who hustle. And few writers are more effective hustlers than Gaiman with his sci-fi novels, graphic novels, children’s books, a British television series, and, yes, movies. Gaiman’s written a flock of television and film scripts that have seen production, and two of his long works –… Continue

Newsman Dan Schorr died last week at the age of 93. He had worked up until two weeks before his death, for the past 25 years as a news analyst and commentator for NPR.



Schorr said public radio hired him because he was a living history book.



“A colleague stuck his head into my office [one day] and said to me, ‘Dan, excuse me, you covered the Spanish-American war, no?’” Schorr told All Things Considered host Robert Siegel in a 2006… Continue

Hannah McLay Arnold is 12 and going into seventh grade. Says her grandmother, Jean Arnold, a friend of mine, Hannah is a wonderful storyteller and writer, and has been since she started talking and playing with her stuffed animals.



Hannah’s favorite class? English.



We writers love her.



Said Jean in a contact via Facebook, “I think she [Hannah] should meet a ‘real’ author. I told her I would contact you.”



Jean is looking for suggestions of what her… Continue

Anything with Stephen King’s name on it sells, right?



Stack ’em high in the front of the bookstore and watch ’em fly out the door. Everybody wants a copy.



And if it’s a re-issue because of an anniversary, well, the publisher and the stores have another sales hook.



Stephen King’s On Writing is just that, a re-issue.



The book came out 10 years ago and sold more than a million… Continue

We have a new top poet in our country – W.S. Merwin, the appointment made two weeks ago.



Merwin looks the role – a mop of white hair, somewhat bushy eyebrows. It’s as if he had studied the portraits of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg and said, “I can look like that.”



But more important than “the look”, Merwin’s a sterling poet who has gathered in a basketful of honors for his work, including two Pulitzer prizes – in 1971 for his… Continue

Did you love Toy Story, that terrific Pixar movie of 15 years ago? Then you’re going to love Toy Story 3 now out in 3-D.



It’s the story of what happens to Woody and Buzz and the other toys now that Andy is 17 and going off to college. The adventures and misadventures are bigger and badder. For the audience, it’s an emotional roller coaster, if you’ll forgive the… Continue

Art who?



One wouldn’t have asked that a half-century ago. Then Art Linkletter was everywhere – on radio and television, in bookstores, he even appeared in two movies. Linkletter also was a regular on the lecture circuit. For a fee, he’d come to your organization’s convention and regale your members for 45 minutes with stories drawn from his life and his television shows.



The man was born 97 years ago in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He… Continue

Sebastian Junger, best known for his book The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea, has a new book out – War. In it he follows a platoon of the Army’s 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a killing zone for the Taliban and Afghan war lords who control the valley and the units of American soldiers sent in hold them off.



Junger… Continue

A couple weeks ago, I told you about Gerry Spence, a master of our craft of writing, and I gave you an example of how he describes characters, drawing the example from Spence’s autobiography, The Making of a Country Lawyer.



Today it’s back to Spence and his autobiography for an example of how he describes place, a setting. Spence’s father was a hunter. Every year, he would go into the Wyoming mountains… Continue

Two weeks ago, I posted a piece on Allen Ginsberg and the stories he wrote on the pictures he took. For Texas crime writer David Hansard, that brought back a memory:





I once spent three days escorting him around the University of Wyoming and surrounds. On our way to the Denver airport he signed my copy of Howl. It echos his photo stories in that he drew a picture and created a succinct narrative out of it– time, place and what was… Continue

Little Orphan Annie, a staple of newspaper comic pages for 86 year, is gone.



The last strip ran last month, ending with Annie kidnapped –again, she was kidnapped so, so many times – and lost in Guatemala.



You didn’t miss her departure, did you?



I didn’t.



I only learned about it while listening to a business story on NPR’s Morning Edition. Annie appeared in fewer than 20… Continue

My mention yesterday of the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb got me to wondering about Peter Sellers. Sellers played Strangelove and two other characters in that 1964 Stanley Kubrick film.



Was Sellers a writer? Did he write any books?



Sadly, no.



He did write his own material in his early days as a stand-up comedian and for his records. And he… Continue

Then you can read War and Peace, The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit 451, or just about any other book . . . as long as it’s on Book-A-Minute’s website.



Can’t believe it?



Here’s Book’s one-minute summary of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

Nurse Ratched: I destroy my patients… Continue

Let’s be honest. We writers, we all want our books to be turned into movies or television series. A degree of celebrity and a lot of money come with it if the movie or the series is a hit.



It happens for few of us. Charlaine Harris a couple years ago with the True Blood series on HBO – vampires on the loose in Bon Temps, a fictional town in Louisiana. Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in a bar,… Continue