I’m done. Finished. I typed The End on my manuscript earlier this week. Right on cue. I met the deadline I set for myself a few months ago when I emailed Julie, my British bestie, to ask if she was planning to visit me so we could make or annual pilgrimage to the US Open (tennis) together?
She replied that she was going to visit her son and family in Manhattan and wanted to visit me , but didn’t want to interrupt my writing since I seemed to be so close to finishing my thriller. I emailed back and said, don’t worry about my writing. I don’t have a deadline. My writing will be there, waiting for me after you’ve visited. Continue reading “I Set A Deadline To Finish My Novel: It Worked”
You don’t have to be an author on deadline to want meals you can get on the table in super fast time. Other busy people appreciate the idea of fast food, too. But I’m not talking about the sort of meals you get in a drive-through in a brown paper bag. I’m talking about delicious farm fresh produce that you can eat almost off the farm stand. 
Two days ago, more than 300 newspapers across America said, “enough is enough” and rose up to protest the despicable and relentless barrage of attacks against the news media by the current occupant of the Oval Office. 
If you’re writing a novel, you know that setting is generally as important an element of the story as character and plot. In its narrowest sense, setting is the location of your story. Nowadays, of course, you don’t have to stir out of your comfortable writer’s chair to conduct location research, and discover if there really is a Gristedes supermarket on the corner of Third and 36th in Manhattan. All the research you need to do is right at your fingertips. You can google places where you want the main action of your novel to take place, or watch Youtube travel videos.
The shooting death of unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin by a fat-faced, ranting cop wannabe “woke” me — as it did many others in white America — more than six years ago in February 2012. Trayvon, a 17-year old African-American was walking along a path in a gated community in Sanford, Florida where he was visiting with his father when George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer shot him through the heart.