Category: Personal

Those Were The Days: Writing Fun Fiction For The Star

The trouble with death cleaning is that it’s too much of a walk down memory lane. Those were the days, you think as you try to decide which clutter to toss. It’s difficult –especially when you come across your first forays into writing fiction.

As I blogged last week, delving into boxes full of old papers and documents produced a whole bunch of acceptance letters for “confessional” stories I’d written when I was living in the U.K.

Death Cleaning Discovery, Part 2

It also produced this 10th anniversary issue of Star magazine (below) from May 1984 — which took me right back to the days of writing fun fiction for that tabloid. Continue reading “Those Were The Days: Writing Fun Fiction For The Star”

Pulp Fiction, Mystery Author Lawrence Block – And Me

Two events last week led to this blog’s headline. The first was reading A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block, the bestselling author of more than 50 mystery novels. This self-published memoir tells the story of his writing career up to the point where he published his first hardcover novel in 1966. 

It’s a tale of his beginnings in the 1950s, when he was honing his writing chops by contributing short stories and novellas to pulp fiction magazines. They were known as such  because they were printed on cheap wood-pulp paper, Nothing to do with the Quentin Tarantino movie of that name. Block, the 1994 recipient of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, sold his first short story in 1957 to Manhunt, a crime pulp magazine.  Continue reading “Pulp Fiction, Mystery Author Lawrence Block – And Me”

Do You Remember Where You Were When The Twin Towers Fell?

Do you remember where you were on 9/11, twenty years ago this coming Saturday when under a terrorist attack the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan fell, the Pentagon was struck by a hijacked plane and Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
I do. Within hours, I was traveling from my home on Long Island, New York to the site of the fallen towers in Lower Manhattan to cover the attack for a British Sunday newspaper. Continue reading “Do You Remember Where You Were When The Twin Towers Fell?”

Janet Malcolm, Jenna — And Me

I hope I don’t shock too many readers when I admit that, until last week, I’d never read a single article by author and venerated New Yorker journalist, Janet Malcolm. She’s the one who is famous for taking journalism to task in a splendid two-part article titled “The Journalist and The Murderer.” It is subtitled, “What Is Journalism For?” Continue reading “Janet Malcolm, Jenna — And Me”