Swirled All the Way to the Shrub

The Roaring Twenties were bellowing along—until they weren't.

In a splintered bar in Boston, Pinky DeVroom, newspaperman, amateur cynic and would-be-novelist, clutches his sour Prohibition brandy and watches his world get sucked down into the vortex. Hope comes in the form of an astute, comely literary agent named Elfred. But hope can be its own form of hell. 

Literature has never had a hero named Pinky—but despite literature's measured qualms, this is its greatest chance.

Think Like a Writer: How to Write the Stories You See

Think Like a Writer will corral your writing ideas—and saddle up the stories you’ve always wanted to write. Do you love language, and how words work to thrill, convince, dazzle, excite?

This book will supply you with the tools to find and cultivate your writer's voice, that unique combination of attributes—sensitivity to language, storytelling and audience—by which writers see and define the world.

Download some free sample chapters of "Think Like a Writer".

Aftershock

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake changed—and ended—many Bay Area lives. There were heroes, there were villains, and there were many people shaken (at first, literally) to the core. A huge event like that can throw lives together in startling ways, and that's the subject of my novel, Aftershock.

Aftershock is the story of three disaster survivors who must then survive each other. One is a blithe joker who is insecure in his art, one a respected businesswoman who feels lost to her father, and one a military veteran whose alcoholism lost him to his family and himself.

Those all sound like downers (and they are) but the interplay between these characters--characters who never would have come together in these ways without the quake—is often hilarious.

Except when it's not. There's a lot of San Francisco in the book, including the city's beauties, and how the AIDS crisis affects a secondary character and thus the protagonist. Even the Bronte sisters get their moments.