The Man of Twists and Turns

Fiction readers are nicer than people who follow politics, who are in turn more thoughtful than people who watch youtube. How do I come up with this ranking of raging rankness? I’ve studied the comments on some websites. Actually I’ve just read the comments following some reviews of my new historical crime novel MOZART’S LAST [...]

Eleanor Roosevelt said that no one can make you feel bad, except yourself. I live by that rule. Particularly when it comes to reviews. And double-particularly when it comes to online reviews. A recent Cornell University study found that 85 percent of amazon.com’s “top reviewers” had received free gifts from vendors. And 78 percent had [...]

I hope you all like the headline. I think it ought to rate well on search engines. See how technological I’ve become? The coming week will see the unveiling of my new podcast. I’ll be podcasting as The Man of Twists and Turns, which is the title of my own blog (and the identifier Homer [...]

Last weekend, my computer played up. Suddenly I couldn’t post the fascinating blog item I had written. I couldn’t update my Facebook page. The computer gave me some kind of message about a “Flash” that had “crashed.” I’m old enough to remember the sputtering rockets of Flash Gordon in the 1950s series that was rebroadcast [...]

I have a new book coming out in the UK next spring. So it’s time to start looking around to see what new web gadgets and gismos authors are expected to shell out for from their meager advances to keep their “web profile” current. It’s a new arms race. Just as the Soviets bankrupted their [...]

Raymond Chandler wrote that a writer shouldn’t read letters until lunchtime. The energy that ought to go into his novel would be diverted to correspondence. If email had been invented 50 years earlier, we might never have had “The Big Sleep.” Email has an itching urgency that letters don’t have. And a letter leads only [...]

On my book tours I often venture to places few others visit. There are book festivals in tiny provincial towns. Readings at bookshops in small rural villages. This week I spoke in a German town that many Germans are convinced doesn’t even exist. Bielefeld (population 330,000) is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. Or is it? [...]

Every couple of days a little alert pops up in my email account letting me know that I can read my books for nothing in Norwegian. My Norwegian’s not so great and I can read my books for nothing any time. But that’s not the point. Scandinavia is a major center of so-called Cyberpunks who [...]