“Nobody Knows Anything” William Goldman, Academy Award Winning Screenwriter ACT 1. PAVLOV I get a phone call out of the blue, a conference call no less, with three guys telling me how great I am, raving, raving, raving about how much they like my novels, though never actually naming a single title. Which is one of the seven deadly warning […]
Close Encounters of the Hollywood Kind, part 3 Read More »
TOO MUCH LIKE THE BOOK My third novel, Bones of Coral, got good reviews, sold moderately well, and was optioned by MGM. Once again I was hired to write the screenplay, but this time I invited my friend Les Standiford to be co-writer. Les had a lot more experience with screenplays, so I was trying
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Part One There was a bidding war for the movie rights to my first novel, Under Cover of Daylight. At the time, I was naively nonchalant about the whole process. I just assumed it was perfectly normal for a first time novelist to be courted by multiple Hollywood producers. However, from this vantage point, 35
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Poems, short stories, articles, op-eds, novels. Submitting poems, stories, articles and novels means they often wind up in an office filing cabinet for months. Or forever. I started submitting poems to magazines while I was still a college student in the 60’s. I’d been writing poems for a couple of years when I decided to
Publishing for 50 Years–Part One, Apprentice Read More »
Two years. That’s how long I lived with Thorn as he wrestled with the dangers he faced in Trickster. During the last two years most of us got a taste of Thorn’s normal life. He’s always been an isolationist, happy to be by himself, focused on crafting his bonefish flies and the view of Blackwater
Back in the early eighties when I was first living full time in Key Largo, I found the place so exotically beautiful that as I began to write that first novel set in the Keys, Under Cover of Daylight, one of my main objectives was to try to do justice to that captivating setting. At
Been reading a lot and watching a bit of TV in the evening when the eyes are tired. (And of course I’ve been chasing the cursor across the blank page. More on that later.) Books: We got hooked on a TV show called Chance, (on Hulu) with Hugh Laurie and a wonderful actor I’d never
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The recent Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway (three-part series on PBS) was a fascinating reminder of the power that a single writer had on shaping American literature. During my forty-year university teaching career I taught a course in Hemingway a few dozen times. Over the years I read all the biographies, most the scholarship, and
