I want you all (and everyone else in the world), to know that The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles, book one (chronologically) of the Tom Hickey California Century series, came out on May 1. Set in 1926 (guess where), it features a lynching, dubious law enforcement and other sorts of misbehavior; and bigshots such as W.R. Hearst and Sister Aimee Semple McPherson.



I’ll be visiting in Scottsdale, Tucson, Los Angeles, Thousand Oaks, Pasadena, Portland, Seattle, and San Diego. If you live or… Continue

The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles, book one of the Tom Hickey California Century novels, is due out in less than two months (May 1, 2010). If you’d like a free copy, shoot email to ken@kenkuhlken.net with an idea for an interesting contest I can run. Any idea I use, the submitter deserves a free book, don’t you think?



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Over the past couple months, I’ve blogged about: making good ideas into realities, on 1/19; birdies (optimism) vs. bogies (pessimism) on 1/26; writing… Continue

Long ago, Viking Press published my novel Midheaven. But the editor who bought it gave up the business, and even when it became a finalist for the Ernest Hemingway Award for best first novel, no paperback edition came out.



Last year, just for the heck of it, I read it over and, discovering the years had made me a far better writer, I revised and sent it to a couple publishers. The response didn’t surprise me.



The mainstream publisher didn’t approve of the Christian… Continue

The past month or so, on my blogspot I've been offering thoughts about what it takes to become a bestselling author, giving some informal case studies, drawing a few conclusions, and overall pondering some different attitudes about why we write and what we aim to accomplish. Sometime soon, I'll collect all this into one piece and give it away to my newsletter… Continue

Here's a rather long quote from Josephine Tey (the speaker is Grant in The Singing Sands)



"It's a harmless sort of weakness," Tad said, with a tolerant lift of a shoulder.



"That is just where you are wrong. It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in the mirror and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of… Continue