The Ten Second Pep Talk

As someone once said of aspiring writers: “Everyone wants to be Jackie Collins on the Letterman show.  No one wants to be Jackie Collins at eight o’clock in the morning facing the blank page.”

The Story of Tall One

The title of this Blog refers to the first of seven stories in my book, The Blessing Stone. Tall One was a female human who lived a hundred thousand years ago on the African savannah. Not quite modern man, yet also not still brutish ape, Tall One symbolizes the transition of Homo sapiens from the animal kingdom to the unique human one. How would such an individual think and act? I wondered. What would her thoughts be? Her dreams? How about her emotions? And how big a part would her basic genetic structure play in her development into Homo sapiens ("Man the Wise")?

What's In A Name?

I read an interesting statistic recently. The most popular first name in the world is Mohammed. The most common last name is Wong. And yet one's chances of meeting Mohammed Wong are very slim.

Whenever I am asked advice about creating characters, one point I always emphasize is, "Take care in choosing a name." This is because a name will tell the reader a lot about that character, probably more than you might think. If, for instance, I name a character Tiffany or Bambi, you can be certain she isn't out of a Jane Austen book. And she most likely is also not over sixty years of age. I would wager, too, that she isn't Jewish, Middle Eastern or African American.

Bury My Heart In Sacred Ground

I live in Indian country.

My town is surrounded by Indian Reservations.  Our local highways sport billboards advertising Indian gaming casinos, and our newspapers frequently run ads for powwows and other special Native American gatherings.  And so it came as no surprise to me when, one day, I felt inspired to write a novel chronicling the history and culture of the Native Americans here in Southern California, tribes whose lives and history were impacted so dramatically by the arrival of Europeans, and which I titled, Sacred Ground.

When Is A Doctor Not A Doctor?

A recent news article about Sen. Clinton's presidential campaign raised a question that I have wondered about for years.  It seems that Clinton's determination to shatter the ultimate glass ceiling is resulting in a backlash of sexism.  A lot of people (and not all of them men) won't vote for a woman for president simply because she is a woman.