In a couple Saturdays — October 14th — I’ll be teaching at the Penn Writer’s Conference. If you’re interested, sign up and check out the other courses being offered. Early in my current novel, I created a character who had a good job and a loving family, but who, it…

I have come to think that to write fiction, as opposed to memoir, creative and straight non-fiction, and divinely inspired material, which in some ways exists fully formed, at least in the mind of the writer, a novelist needs to have, at the very least, his or her characters well…

Writers are always searching for little exercises to warm them up and give them courage to face the blank screen. My friend, Jay, was recently tapped to contribute to an upcoming anthology of nonfiction writing exercises (joining Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Jill McCorkle, Margot Livesey, Alice Mattison, and others)….

I read last night at an independent bookstore in Atlanta called Chapter 11*, which would be a funny name except they filed for bankruptcy a month or two ago, just before the new laws went into effect (see my blog entry, New Bankruptcy Laws, 9/22/05). A friendly but rather glum-looking…

As much as I’ve enjoyed the publicity phase, I’m OK with it ending and getting back to writing. Really. There was an initial rush, a surge of satisfaction that accompanied the publication – seeing it for the first time in a store, getting a review, being interviewed — and some…

There are many idiosyncrasies in the publishing industry. For example, a company will announce an initial printing of a certain number of copies. This is sort of like a White House spokesman leaking a policy or a name that the President is considering endorsing in order to gauge the reaction,…

“Don Silver’s richly imagined and exuberant novel of the 60s is as groovy, brilliant and exact as a kaleidoscope, and shows that he possesses a startling, often blazing talent…” Anonymous