Twelve Rules for Life as an Author
Authors don’t have ordinary lives. Ask them – I don’t know any writer who won’t happily tell you in 500 words or less. Whether writing the Great American Novel or how to outwit Bill Maher, authors have their own unique POV (point of view). As a writer, family therapist, and author of 27 books, I […]
An Author’s World
It’s not pretty out there. Here’s what I see from my windows. China publishes the largest number of new and revised book titles per year – 440,000. U.S is second at 304,912, and the United Kingdom is third at 184,000. UNESCO monitors the number and type of books published annually for each country, using […]
Welcome To My Cave
Welcome to my cave. It’s a place of organized chaos; a mirror for what goes on in my head. There are corners, crevices, and hideaways for everything. Check out my computers. As the daughter of an engineer, I’ve always been a computer geek. My friends like to call me a techie but I use computers […]
The Attack of the Commas
They mean blood. Lots of it. They embed themselves like ink maggots twisting words, skewing thoughts, and threatening deletion. I know. I’m a victim. It’s a serious assault. Everyone knows only amateurs abuse commas. Professionals like me, an author of twenty six books and hundreds of articles, are never victims of these dreaded creatures. Wrong! […]
What Defines a Serial Killer?
T here are murders in this world every day. We read about them so often that we no longer have a sick reaction to the news, whether on television, in the newspaper, or on the internet – unless it affects us on a personal level. War, gang violence, and murders of passion are in the […]
What’s Your Theory? Is It Time to Connect the Dots?
R ecently, a sophomore at the University of Virginia, Hannah Graham, was reported missing. She met her friends for dinner, stopped off at two different parties off campus and was seen leaving alone from the second party. She had texted her friends at 1:20 am to let them know she had been lost trying to […]
What’s A “Good” Psychopath?
“P sychopath up.” says Dr. Kevin Dutton, a leading expert on functional psychopathy. “A bit of localized psychopathy is good for all of us.” Huh? Your first reaction might be that Dutton, a research psychologist from Oxford University, and author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, might have had one too many servings of bangers and […]
The Bloody Benders
H ave you ever heard of a serial killer family? The Bloody Benders were the first in the United States. Over a century later, you can still find them in books, TV, and on the big screen – people never get tired of their story! It was the 1870s. There were four Benders in the […]
Psychopaths Who DON’T Kill
A re there really psychopaths who don’t kill? Most psychopaths are not murderers. They’re all around us – often successful in careers from blue-collar to high level executives and professionals. Think of it as a Psychopathic Spectrum – a scale that measures the number of psychopathic traits in an individual. Like any scale, a person […]
Who is Joshua Jenkins? An Author’s Tale.
M ost people have forgotten the teenager or never heard of him. I used to be one of them. It was a lovely day in Los Angeles. I had just flown in from New York to visit my friend, Fern. One of our favorite pastimes was to swap stories – everything from local people to […]