A fork in the road

You may have noticed that The Burrow has been unusually quiet. That’s because I’ve been working on a new project that requires a whole new public face — that “fork in the road” in the title. I’ve decided to try a new genre — historical mystery/intrigue. It’s a booming genre,…

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Fake is for real

My work-in-progress Fake — a rewrite of a 2009 attempt at an art-crime mystery — now has a beginning, middle and end all in the same file. I hesitate to call it “finished,” because it’s a long way from that, but I now have a completed draft. It’s way overweight at…

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Building 30th Street Station

NOTE: This post originally appeared on Novel Travelist on 26 Oct 2013. Sadly, Novel Travelist is going away. I’m reposting here so the information will live on after that site disappears. In my international thriller Doha 12, assassins follow Our Heroes Jake Eldar and Miriam Schaffer to Philadelphia’s 30th Street…

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Building the Future

NOTE: This post originally appeared on Novel Travelist on 27 Jan 2014. Sadly, Novel Travelist is going away. I’m reposting here so the information will live on after that site disappears. With Google, Flickr, YouTube and all the rest, you can get a pretty good idea of what other places…

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Faking It

Enough people have asked me this question that I figured I finally need to answer it: other than reviewing movies, what have I been doing? I’ve been writing something new. Except it’s old. Back in 2007, inspired by a trip to Florence and Milan, I wrote a mystery called Fake….

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Real-World Event: Indie Publishing Panel, 30 March 2014

I’ll be venturing into the real world to participate in an indie publishing panel sponsored by the Sherman Oaks NaNoWriMo group. My co-panelists will be Kristen Elise, mistress of Murder Lab (which I’ve mentioned before) and author of the science thriller The Vesuvius Isotope, and Leslie Ann Moore, author of…

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Publishing the Second Time Around, on Murder Lab

The Murder Lab blog just put up Part 1 of The Second Time Around, my accounting of what the second-time publishing experience was like for me. Some things changed, some didn’t, and as in life, it wasn’t always the right things that changed or stayed the same. If you’re interested…

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Kristen Elise: Making Science Thrilling

[Note: this is a departure for me in two ways. One, I rarely write about writing. Second, the Burrow’s never hosted a guest writer before. But Kristen Elise, author of The Vesuvius Isotope, has done something I signally failed to do in three attempts: write a thriller that involves science….

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Criminal Element: Addicted to Addicted Detectives

Stazione Centrale, Milan, 2007

Once more, I’m consorting with the Criminal Element. This installment is a think piece about why so many literary detectives are addicts. Crime fiction is cheerfully described as an addiction by many of its fans, including such diverse personalities as Sigmund Freud and Woodrow Wilson. Just as neurochemical addicts have…

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