Only it wasn’t: six months later, she told her sister that we were married, and her sister told everybody else in the family, and most of the village. I eventually found myself obliged to visit Catalonia for the first time to meet all my in-laws and their friends. Not that I knew what Catalonia was, assuming (as did almost everyone else in the world at the time) that it was a Spanish province, complete with the usual Spanish paraphernalia: flamenco, bullfights, sangria, and one language only: . I was astonished to discover that all the people around me in this village just sixty kilometres out ..read more

Given my complete lack of artistic skills, hiring a professional to handle the artwork for my first book was a no-brainer. I did my research, found an insanely talented artist, and worked with him to craft the perfect spot illustrations. I had originally planned to do the same for the book cover, but after giving it some thought, I realized that I knew exactly how I wanted my cover to look. This led me to wonder if technology could help me overcome my artistic shortcomings and allow me to design the cover of my dreams. Perhaps there was an artist within me after all.     ..read more

First, here’s my dad’s advice, which is humdrum and repeated by many, especially older generations: Never talk politics or religion at the dinner table and especially not at Thanksgiving when you are with extended family you see once a year. This taboo everyone knows, and yet fewer and fewer folks abide by. Like everyone else, I have my opinions, but because I know my brother has a diametrically opposed take-on-the-world, I am loathe to broach any topic that might offend him or worse cause him to plunge into a rant. His harangues launch into esoteric binges. If one makes the smallest, most inc ..read more

Up until that point, I had been a marathon writer, working on the page for hours at a time. If I didn’t devote at least two hours to writing at a given time, I considered it time wasted, or not enough time to get anything done. If I only had an hour, I would spend most of the time organizing my thoughts, or my workspace, researching random facts that I didn’t actually need, or trying to figure out the right song for the mood I wanted in the scene. Then I’d spend about five minutes staring at the blank page until the hour was up and I could return to ignoring my novel all over again.  ..read more

I submit Freytag’s Pyramid, the most common variation of the short story and longer forms of creative work. If you know anything about short stories, you might have seen graphs or pictures making a rudimentary pyramid, with the climax being the very top point and the rising and falling of the action making up its sides. This is Freytag’s Pyramid, even if you didn’t know it was called that.  ..read more

So here are my Thirteen Rules of Successful Critique for receiving critiques. Once again, these are outlined based on groups where the author reads his or her piece aloud to a group reading along to a printed copy but can often be applied to other critique structures as well ..read more

What's more, it’s not only psychologists who like my ideas — the has accepted a related article on the need for more Maori doctors. I’m all smiles ..read more

Inside, I scale down, but right outside my doors stretches the endless open space. Cooking one-pot meals on a single hob, in a cubicle which is my kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom at once, I am learning to cut down on what’s not essential. Including in my writing. I keep crossing off objects from my list of things to bring on a trip, and metaphors from my new poem ..read more

Language is a dragon you have to wrestle with. With words, I create a bridge of meaning between my own experience and someone else's understanding of that same experience. Knowledge bases are different, and each person has by default, an arsenal of experience and references to draw from to attribute meaning to language. Often, we get it wrong, creating gaps in our word usage so that the true meaning of what we want to convey isn't transferred over from writer to reader. We get it wrong and create only misunderstanding and a gulf between individual and collective belief ..read more

Certainly, every biographer of a living writer or artist has their own decidedly singular path to their subject. In my case, my biography, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (HarperPerennial, 2006) grew out a profile I wrote about the author on the occasion of his 80th birthday for the . But truth be told, there is a more chimerical backstory that begins long before this. The story behind my becoming Ray Bradbury’s biographer was, well, rather ..read more