For those of you who love a good horror story, fasten your seatbelts. You’re about to hear a doozy. I must warn you, there are no guts or high-pitched screams, no axes or dark forests, but there is death. Death of ego and pride, dreams and aspirations…no less bloody but maybe less chill bump inducing….
I distinctly remember the first conference I ever went to. I still to this day don’t know how I got the mailing list, but a postcard announcing the conference came shortly after I’d made the decision to pursue a publishing career. It was like I was meant to go. That turned out to be true….
On January 15th, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 departed from LaGuardia airport. In the climb out after takeoff, the plane was struck in both turbofan engines by a flock of Canadian geese. The engines caught fire and lost power immediately. Captain Chesley Sullenberger was forced to ditch the plane moments later in the Hudson River. …
Ever since the word “platform” began floating around publishing circles, a whole bunch of fiction writers shuddered. Why? Because though we understood the importance of platform, it seemed the way to it for fiction writers, new ones especially, was going to be much, much harder than for non-fiction writers. How do you build a platform…
Recently I walked into my usual coffee house and was looking for a place to sit and work when a woman recognized me and said hello. We chatted for a bit and she said, “Do you do your writing here?” “Almost every day,” I said. “Wow.” She looked truly astonished. “I assumed you worked in…
If you were to ask me to describe the Oklahoma City bombing to you, I’d be able to give you a very accurate picture of what happened that day. The building had a gaping hole. Cars and trees were on fire. Ash-covered people wondered aimlessly like zombies. Police, fire and ambulances came rushing to the…
Even though she’d lived through the horrors of war and the Nazi occupation, by her teens Audrey Hepburn was an accomplished ballerina. Her family had moved her to Holland in hopes of keeping her safe, but the Germans had overrun the country, destroying villages and exacting horrific and sadistic executions. Not yet an adult, young…
Here’s a brief history of how I decided to become a writer: I was in college and, forced to declare a major, I decided to go with Mass Communications. It seemed to be a nice umbrella of a major, with lots of post-graduation options. Plus, I liked to talk. Somewhere between English I and a…
In 1968, composer Alex North walked into the New York City premiere of the latest film he had been commissioned to score, 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was fresh off Oscar nominations for Sparticus, Cleopatra, The Agony and the Ecstasy and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It was another chance for this extraordinary composer’s talent…
On December 11th, 1998, NASA launched a space probe called the Mars Climate Orbiter. All was going well with this space nugget until, less than a year later, NASA lost communication with the probe. It was eventually determined that it vaporized in the upper atmosphere of Mars due to a trajectory that brought it too…