(Here’s the first excerpt from the first booklet in the How It Was series. I do not plan to post the entire book this way, in regular blog posts spread out over time; what I do hope to do, I explain here.)
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Deep in his being, The Boy knew that somewhere out there existed a world [...]

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I know, I know… I said, “In my next post on How It Was, I’ll include an excerpt from ‘Book 1: Spring.’” It’s coming.
In the meantime, please check this page. It describes how I’m hoping to make the whole process of posting, downloading, and reading excerpts easier for both you and me. Eventually, it will [...]

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A rough outline of the path taken by a novel to publication in the traditional way:
First, a definition: by “publication in the traditional way,” I mean that the end product is a hard- or soft-cover book which can be found on the shelves of — or can be ordered by — just about any bookstore [...]

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As I’ve mentioned, the events of the How It Was series of booklets took place in the real world as well as in the world of The Boy’s imagination (then and now). The real town where all this happened is in southern New Jersey, on the Delaware River and a few miles north of Philadelphia.
The [...]

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Over there on the right, in the “Family/Friends/Alter Egos” portion of the blogroll, you’ll see a couple names you may recognize.
The most likely such candidate would be Diana Gabaldon, creator of the hugely successful series of quote-unquote “romance” novels beginning with Outlander (original title, and title as published in the UK, Cross-stitch).
You may or may [...]

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This will be an ongoing series of posts, because it’s something I believe is about to demolish the traditional publishing industry — and who can sum up everything about an impending apocalypse within the scope of a single blog post?
Short version: Because they lend themselves more readily than books to digital form, music, movies, and [...]

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The year was 1990. I’d taken a leave of absence from work, and moved from New Jersey to Virginia, to a little town where no one I knew lived and only one or two people I knew had even heard of. (I’ll tell that whole story later.) I’d been in Ashland for a few [...]

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