Under Cover

     I n high school I was not a fan of English class. It seemed that we spent an eternity talking about Shakespeare and a bunch of books that I really wasn’t interested in that we talked way too much about. When I went to college I was happy to write research papers and the deeper I got the more I fell in love with research and writing. While my goal as a kid was to write teleplays and screenplays my teens brought the dream of writing a novel. I had started a novel that would be abandoned repeatedly, but life led me to a path of writing nonfiction.      School and work brought questions of local folklore and urban legends which I began to research and practice writing papers about. I eventually shared some of my work to help a friend learn how to write research papers and after a while people viewed me as someone who knew about these stories. This led to a ghost group where I immersed myself in over 130 years’ worth of research and created handbooks for my...

E arlier this year I was proud to publish my first non-fiction book in eight years. I published six books from 2008 until 2017 and had struggled to develop a new project since then. Granted, from 2023 through 2024 I did have two short stories published in anthologies as well as wrapped up a novel I had been working on before 2017 as well as create and finish my second. My shift to fiction took a bit of time but I feel the grip under my feet the more I write. Since I lost momentum after 2017’s Handbook for the Amateur UFO Investigator I feel like I’ve gained greater confidence in writing as well as ability to finish projects since finally tackling that first novel. I did feel like I had unfinished business in the non-fiction realm and felt I needed something else to hold up my most popular book, Handbook for the Amateur Cryptozoologist , that came out in 2014 with good success that led to a second edition in 2015 with a foreword from Loren Coleman and other minor updates. Eastern...

L i fe has been busy and while I had big plans for this blog it was one of many things that I have put on the back burner. My goal was to write a weekly blog post on how to become a better writer and in true writer form I became distracted and eventually abandoned this project. However, I've returned and still have several pieces for this blog in various stages of development to share. I started out by looking at some basic questions I have been asked through the years when it comes to writing. I have plenty more in the oven but also some more complicated ones and some that cover aspects of just being an author. I enjoy writing these posts as it gives me some time to reflect but also share my thoughts with the world without feeling like I am giving anyone unsolicited advice. My thoughts shared here are merely my opinion (with some facts sprinkled in) and things may work out for you in other ways. What have I been up to since July of last year? Early in 2024 I was excited about the ...

 I have been fortunate to have published both non-fiction and fiction as well as many articles over the years. My first publishing came with non-fiction as I self-published six books before focusing on writing fiction. I’ve been asked this question a couple of times and I want to get my opinion out there before focusing on specific topics. The big difference between these types of books is that one is based on facts and information and is objective and the other is entirely or almost entirely made up and is subjective. At first thought you might think that being able to write about your own characters and plot and making a story up from scratch sounds easier than adhering to writing about facts and information, but both have their easy and hard aspects. Books in the non-fiction genre tend to be shorter than those in fiction depending upon what type of fiction you are writing.  In writing a non-fiction book (I’ll talk about how to write them in a future blog post) there is mor...