Author and Ghostwriter
I’ve been reading thrillers and other types of genre fiction lately. Clive Cussler is my favorite of these so far, largely because I really like action. Car chases, helicopter crashes, pirate battles: all that stuff! Here’s what I think of this latest Cussler book Shock Wave. The opening is fantastic. The action and scene-setting are … Read more
I’m pleased as punch to publish this Kirkus Review of my Young Adult novel, Bits of String too Small to Save. The reviewer called it “impressively creative,” “wildly imaginative,” “occasionally haunting,” and declared it “anchored by strong, evolving female characters.” This book has a ton of characters, each weirder than the next, which makes it … Read more
Hey folks! I’m excited to announce the release of a new memoir by Pangloss Press: Business Cards and Shoe Leather, by Larry Vaughn, with me, Ruby Peru. This touching memoir is about dyslexia, the cooperative mindset, and running an ethical business. Business Cards and Shoe Leather is a great example of the kind of work … Read more
Three cheers for Caitlin Moran’s memoir, How to Be a Woman, which had me laughing all the way through and on into the night! Meet Writer Caitlin Moran With a precocious start as a teen music writer, she went on to write a column for The Times for nearly two decades. You can study lots of … Read more
I want to talk about Abby Wambach’s memoir and why I didn’t really like it, but I’m quite sure what’s wrong with Wambach’s memoir isn’t her fault. It’s probably her agent’s, publisher’s, and editor’s faults. It all has to do with the fact that America has an obsession with trauma in memoir. In fact, I’m … Read more
Anthony Bourdain, rest his soul, was a writer in the true sense of the word. That is to say, he wasn’t so much a “writer” as someone who had a lot to write about. His background in the restaurant industry inspired his first book, Kitchen Confidential. That memoir, in turn, led to a career that grew … Read more
Here we go again with the never-ending sequence of blogs about Megyn Kelly’s memoir, Settle for More. (see this one and that one) I promise this will be the last, but I have to comment on the mistake of subtracting the drama from memoir. I read the last third of the book and found to … Read more
Back to Megyn Kelly’s memoir, Settle for More. (here’s my first blog on the subject) I’m going to refine my criticism of it in the previous blog, just because I went ahead and read the second third of the book. I can now state unequivocally: a moralizing memoir like this one really annoys me. The … Read more
When people ask me what I do and I tell them I ghostwrite memoirs, they often ask if I write celebrity memoirs. Actually, what I do is very different from your typical celebrity memoir, because unlike celebrity ghostwriters, I tell my clients: don’t be the hero of every story. This is a handy memoir tip … Read more
I am being driven crazy, and the ones doing it are so-called friends: people that I ask to read my novel Bits of String Too Small to Save and leave an Amazon Review. Ahem … people don’t seem to know the difference between a critique and a review. This fact may finally be my undoing. … Read more