Melvin McNair: World’s Nicest Hijacker

I met Melvin McNair on a dusty playing field in Caen, a city on the French Atlantic coast that had been bombed into permanent dreariness during WWII. He was managing the local baseball team, and I was managing a Paris-based team. During the course of a doubleheader, we chatted on the field, and off during …

How to market your unpublished novel… or not

I've been listening to the Ringo Starr song, It Don't Come Easy. The song is (forgive the pun) easy on the ears, and it's also kind of an anthem for anyone trying to do something extremely daunting. Like trying to get someone to represent, publish (or heck, read) literary fiction. So, ya want to be …

Introducing “But I Digress”

I'm very lucky. I know a lot of great writers. But like most writers, I'm a bit of a recluse, which means I don't see or talk with them very often. This is my avatar, Michael Missing, drawn by and given me by my late friend Michael Hoover. So I've had a wonderful idea: an …

The Factory: A Novel: The Pitch

What my brain looks like when trying to pitch my fiction. The good news is that I’m done with The Factory: A Novel. Now I need to pitch it (to an agent, a publisher, a movie producer, a doormouse… I suck at pitching my own stuff. There is a short pitch and a long pitch. …