Years ago, I used a writing prompt to focus on describing a room because descriptions aren't easy. You need to capture enough details of a room to provide insight into the characters and situations, but not so much that you're overwhelming the reader with a catalog.

The first story to emerge from that prompt eventually became “Homework Assignment #3,” published in The Militant Grammarian. In "Homework Assignment," a college student explains to his writing professor that he tried several approaches to writing about a room but none of them worked--because he realizes there's a room he needs to write about but can't because that room holds too much emotion. 

"Homework Assignment #3" actually contains five or so self-contained story ideas, each with subtext to the room he can't write about. Each idea is based on a room and a different emotion. "Shrine to the Cult of Joy" is one of the stories my initial narrator considered but decided not to write. Before being published in The Militant Grammarian, "Shrine to the Cult of Joy" won honorable mention at the 2023 Marblehead Literary Festival. 

I've written another story based on an idea from "Homework Assignment #3," and now need to revise it. I will be writing additional stories about rooms and emotions based on "Homework Assignment #3."

Based on the research we conducted for "Stealing Time," my co-author, Tilia Klebenov Jacobs, and I found 11 different plot types, including classic, comedic, tragic, revenge, paranoid, and one last score. Click here to read the whole article.    

As part of the 2025 New England Crime Bake writers conference, I participated on a panel entitled, "DIY: Is Self-Publishing for You?" that was moderated by Susan Oleksiw. The other panelists, Donna Clancy and Elaine Isaak and I, provided a range of perspectives on the topic. 

By the way, a key point is that if you're not necessarily locked in; you can always try the other path to explore it for yourself. 

I prepared the attached chart to provide an overview of the benefits and drawbacks of each path. It is not an exhaustive list, and others' experiences may vary. (You can also access it here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1375970460442687/permalink/1591152662257798/?mibextid=wwXIfr&rdid=aem50C4VDtrZC8AZ#.)

Please let me know if you have any questions or any suggestions regarding anything I may have missed.

We’re thrilled to share that Stealing Time has been named a Top Pick in the 2025 Silver Falchion Awards by Killer Nashville!

The Silver Falchion Awards recognize the best in mystery, thriller, and suspense fiction. In its second year, according to Killer Nashville, Top Picks are chosen by their judges as books “they couldn’t put down and couldn’t stop thinking about.”

That’s exactly what we hoped to create with Stealing Time—a high-stakes time-travel heist filled with heart, humor, and a twisty emotional journey between a teenage girl and her younger, 1980s-version father.

​To be recognized alongside so many incredible authors and storytellers is an honor. We’re grateful to the Killer Nashville team, the judges, and our readers for making this possible.

We picked up two awards this week: the 2025 Falchion Finalist for Best Juvenile/Y.A., and a 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Award YA Finalist.

I don't write to win awards. I write to tell stories that I find interesting, often to push myself to write something I wasn't sure I could. I write stories that I'd like to read.

So I don't write for awards.

But it's great to win awards like the Silver Falchion, part of the Killer Nashville Writers Conference, whose jury is comprised of seasoned crime writers. 

The Silver Falchion, along with positive reviews in the Denver Post, Dayton Daily News and hundreds of positive reader reviews on Goodreads, NetGalley and Amazon, validate something special for me.

That an idea for a book that my daughter and I kicked around years ago was not only a fun idea but is now a real, tangible book that people enjoy and recommend. 

We've had responses from people who say they don't read YA or don't read time travel but loved the book! 

And for that, I am grateful and appreciative. ​Much thanks go to my daughter, Rebecca, and to my co-author, Tilia. And, to my wife, Deborah, who talks up the book more than I do.

I'll be writing more about this as I get closer to giving a workshop on marketing your book but being a writer takes more than writing.

Obviously, the writing is important.

But after finishing a story, poem, article, novel, etc., the next part is also challenging. Finding a publication that will publish you story, poem, article or a publisher to publish your novel. 

Identifying and researching the right outlet can take time.  Every publication suggests you read their back issues before submitting. That's good, often overlooked advice--because who has the time to read through every potential magazine? But if you don't read a little bit from each potential magazine, you might not know if your piece is appropriate for it. I've read back issues to see that my stories wouldn't be a good fit. Why waste my time or the editors' on a submission that's never going to get accepted? And in one case, I found a publication whose name I didn't like but I liked the stories they published, so I sent in a story that I thought would be a good fit, and within a week or so, they accepted it.

So identifying potential markets for your short pieces is absolutely important to being a published writer. It can take multiple efforts at pitching your story (I write stories so I will generally refer to that in this post but the same applies to poems and short nonfiction) before you find a home willing to publish your piece. 

So having patience is an important quality.

So is resilience. I've had some pieces accepted on the first few tries. And some that have taken years to place. 

In the case of several stories, after some rejections, I'll put them aside and then pick them up again, figure out how I think I should fix them, and have gotten lucky, finally, in finding a home. 

Recently I've reworked two stories that I believed in. I hope to hear the end of next month whether the editors at one publication and the judges at a competition agree with me.

I've actually learned something each time I rework an old story I liked. Each time, I think I've made it better, and I've had some success in placing those. 

Mostly this blog is to encourage myself and readers/writers to not give up on their writing. If you like the piece, it's okay to move on. But it's also okay to keep trying to fix and place it. 

And it's also to recognize that after you've finished your project, you will likely need to spend a lot of time finding a home for it--even as you need to write your next story.

​Good luck!

Trying to write a novel is a gamble. It takes hours of planning, actual writing, editing, etc., and you don't really know if it will pay off. 

I've heard plenty of stories about authors shelving novels that didn't work, despite spending years developing them.

Luckily, "Stealing Time," a time-travel jewelry heist, does not appear to be one of those. 

The premise of "Stealing Time" originated when my young daughter noticed a rotary phone one night in the library room of a hotel where she, my wife and I went for dinner. My daughter had seen a rotary phone in an old movie or TV show but never in real life. She asked if she could make a phone call -- to her brothers, who were at home, having decided not to join us -- but she had trouble placing the call. (There was no "send" button.)

Some time later, we were discussing what it would be like if a girl her age were sent back to a time before cell phones. We worked out the initial scenario that included meeting her father, who would be her age when they met but we couldn't figure out what the cause or the reason why she would be sent back in time.

A little while later, I came up with the inciting incident. And a while after that, Tilia and I joined forces to write what became "Stealing Time."

After we finished the manuscript, we submitted it to the Claymore Award, an award for unpublished books that's part of the Killer Nashville Writers Conference. "Stealing Time" won a top pick!

So even before publication, it seems that "Stealing Time" is a gamble that paid off!

The book is available for pre-order here, and will be published Nov. 19, 2024.

I generally don't use writing prompts. I see the value in them but as far as I can remember, I've only used a writing prompt once. 

It was for "Homework Assignment #3," a story just published in The Militant Grammarian, and the prompt was: “Write something in which a place becomes a metaphor or is a locus of a specific emotion.”

Seems simple enough. But at the time I was given that prompt, I didn't want to write a simple straightforward story. I didn't want to write a serious story about a heavy emotion. 

I wanted to write something that would be more fun.

So I decided to write a dramatic monolog from the perspective of a college student in a writing workshop who is trying to explain to his writing professor why he's struggling to write a story using the same writing prompt. In the end, he does actually describe a room and the emotion it holds but only in an indirect way that allowed me to have some fun.

Along the way, the narrator describes seven different ideas along with the reasons he doesn't think they'd work. For me, part of the fun was that instead of coming up with just one room and one emotion, I had to come up with eight -- the seven that the narrator dismisses and the one room that he ultimately describes.

For example, one of ideas would require a flashback, and the narrator dismisses the overall concept because he knows -- has been told, as I have -- that flashbacks are much more complicated than you'd think, in part because they disrupt the narrative flow. So of course, I included a significant flashback in "Homework Assignment." 

The goal was that all the story concepts had to be different from each other, different characters, settings, etc. They couldn't be a variation of a theme or involve the same character or location. At the same time, they had to have a way to connect to the narrator, had to seem like concepts he could have devised, and had to help with the emotional payoff at the end. And I wanted many of them to have a humorous element, something to make it fun to write and to keep the reader's interest.

An added benefit for me was that when I looked at the stories-within-the-story, I decided some of them were worth writing as standalone stories. One of them, "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," recently received an honorable mention in the 2023 Marblehead Literary Festival. Another needs some polishing and I hope to start submitting soon. In the meantime, I'm working on two others.

Which is to say that "Homework Assignment #3" has spun off several stories I'm proud of, a pretty good payoff for one writing prompt.

I don't always remember when I get ideas for stories. But in the case of "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," I do remember where I got the idea. 

I'm interested what sparks story ideas because the process of finding a story-worthy scenario isn't science. It's not just inspiration from a muse. The source of a story may help me understand what I'm thinking about (as Joan Didion said, in her essay, "Why I Write") or what another writer, whose story I'm reading, is thinking. Not every story needs to make a point about society, of course. But if writers can write about any topic, it's worth looking at what motivates them, and what they're trying to say about the world they're depicting.

For "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," the goal was to write about a room that contained a lot of emotion; the scenario of a daughter and mother who have a complicated relationship came from a different story, "Homework Assignment #3," which has just been accepted for publication. 

In "Homework Assignment #3," a dramatic monolog, the narrator is a college student who tries to explain to his off-screen professor why he's been unable to fulfil the assignment of the assigned writer's prompt -- to write a story in which a room is a locus of emotion. In the course of that other story, the narrator describes several possible ideas that he tried and dismissed because he feels he couldn't write any of them. (The reason becomes apparent by the end of the story.)

After setting "Homework Assignment #3" aside, I figured a way to write the story that became "Shrine." As basic as it sounds, I started with a description of the room in order to set up the emotion the room holds for the daughter. That meant describing the contents of the main character's room as Gabby decides what to take with her to college, what to give away or trash, and what to leave behind. It was those details that help establish who Gabby is and what her relationship is to her mother. 

While I knew what the beginning had to describe, I had no idea what the middle of the story would entail, and only a partial sense of what final section should be. As details fleshed out the lives and disagreements between Gabby and her mother, I kept asking: how are these relevant, what don't I need to keep?

I had to figure the plot and raise the stakes while maintaining a focus on the room as a character itself. As with Gabby, the room changes over the several years covered in the story. It was interesting going from what I knew I had to describe in the first section to figuring out the path to the climax.

Part of the challenge for me is that while "Homework Assignment #3" and "Shrine to the Cult of Joy" are standalone stories -- they are not sequels, for example, because they have different types of narrators (first person and third person, close perspective) and involve different characters entirely, different settings (New York City and suburban Massachusetts), etc., I wanted to keep them connected. Since the scenario in "Shrine" originated in "Homework Assignment," I wanted to write "Shrine" as if the "Homework" narrator was the writer. "Shrine" had to be the story the "Homework" narrator could tell, the story that would interest him, with some of his obsessions, his interests. That is why there is a similarity in the description of Gabby and her mother and the love interest in "Homework" and her mother.

Along the way, I moved sections around, added new content, deleted unnecessary scenes. After a lot of work to make sure "Shrine" could stand on its own (instead of being a story-within-another-story), it won Honorable Mention in the 2023 Marblehead Literary Festival. 

My main point is that you have to trust and believe in your ideas. Often it takes longer to see them through completion -- at least for me -- but I'm pleased that my conviction in the story ultimately paid off.