My father is eighty-six years old. He has a bad heart, bad lungs, bad kidneys. He uses a cane or a walker to get around. His memory is becoming an issue. He lives with me and my wife in a cozy little area of his own in the lower level of our home. He spends … Read more
When you read the work of a fine author, what you see, generally speaking, appears flawless and flowing, as if it came naturally and without a lot of struggle. Don’t you believe it. Every author battles to get a work from their imagination onto the page. I’m working on a novel right now. When completed, … Read more
Tim O’Brien, one of my favorite authors, published a marvelous book several years ago titled Into the Lake of the Woods. It is, in many ways, a mystery, one that frustrates a lot of readers because at the end, the protagonist heads off into the labyrinthine archipelago of Lake of the Woods and is never … Read more
The Northwest Angle: A geographic anomaly, a small triangle of American territory completely isolated from the rest of Minnesota, cut off from the United States by sixty miles of Canadian wilderness and the vast, mysterious waters of Lake of the Woods. Lake of the Woods: One of the largest bodies of water on the North … Read more
One of the first tenets pounded into my head in every writing class I ever took was this: Write what you know. We’ve all heard it. But when most authors in my genre sit down to write a book, they’re faced with the realization that they know little or nothing about much of the information … Read more