One of my favorite taglines ever is for the screenwriting software Final Draft: “Just add words. ” It’s that easy. And that difficult. Of course, you need to know which order to put them in. But that’s what rewriting is for.

Use it now. There may not be a later. And if there is a later, you’ll think of more best stuff.

Do you promise not to tell? Okay, here goes: All three of my Las Vegas novels, “Dice Angel,” “Money Shot,” and “The House Always Wins,” are essentially the same story. Sure, they feature different characters, different challenges and different timelines. But the structure is the same. The main character, through a combination of luck (good…

Even those of us who are old and cranky and thick-skinned sometimes get stung by a particularly brutal rejection or review. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to convert the negativity into fuel for future success, essentially an “I’ll show you, you mother-effer” approach. But I’ve never seen better advice than this rant from…

My friend, Marek Biernacinski, is an original thinker and a talented wordsmith in his own right. Recently, he crafted an Amazon review for my new Las Vegas ghost novel, “The House Always Wins,” that goes much deeper than the typical feedback authors tend to get on these types of sites. I love it because he…

I’ll be pissed. But I’ll also be satisfied. Because I crossed “writing a novel” off my bucket list. Four times. Plus a bunch of short stories and other forms of fiction from flash to serial. I know how hard it is to do something many people talk about but few actually achieve. I know the…

With the launch of my fourth novel, “The House Always Wins,” in October, 2017, I’ve been in full promo mode for the last four months. Luckily, I’m a marketing guy in real life, which may give me a leg up but doesn’t make the task any easier. Still, as they say in the Farmer’s TV…

One of the Facebook groups I enjoy most is the appropriately-named “Writers Helping Writers,” a peer group that does exactly what it says. This morning, I ran across a post from Steven Urenda, author of “Against My Religion,” that is at once funny, powerful and spot-on. In responding to a series of threads about what…

I don’t remember much about the classes I took in college. Four decades have come and gone, after all. But one of my favorites, a course on criticism, has stayed with me. One of the most important lessons is that criticism is about much more than personal taste. Saying “I liked it” or “I didn’t…

Sometimes, when I read my old stuff, I don’t remember writing it. And sometimes I think it’s good. I’ll marvel at a particular word choice or phrase, pondering “Where the heck did that come from?” It’s a wondrous feeling, knowing I was in the flow at that moment, the mysterious lightning-in-a-bottle process in which we…