FROM HERMIT TO NON-FICTION WRITER

I’ve become a writing hermit. My publisher and writer friends urge me to join twitter. I don’t because I don’t want to devote time to tweeting when I could be writing. I don’t keep up with my FaceBook page, and my blog has about four posts a year. I’ve virtually stopped reading non-fiction. I have a life outside of writing. My wife and I travel, cook, go to plays and museums, etc. But in my professional life, I just write.

So when Tim Hallinan invited me to be a contributor for a collection he was putting together on how to plot a book, I thought to myself, if I I don’t read non-fiction because I don’t want to lose another chunk of time, why would I lose an even bigger chunk writing it? But it’s Tim Hallinan, one of my favorite authors, and he did all the work. All I had to do was write a small piece about my plotting (or lack thereof).

It turned out to be surprisingly refreshing task. But what was more surprising was I enjoyed reading the contributions of the other twenty writers. That’s when I realized I had become a hermit. So now the book is out, and I hope some writers will be helped by it and that it sells enough copies for Tim to recoup the time and money he put into the project. And I’m glad I did it because I learned a lot from the other contributors and enjoyed both the reading and the writing. Will I start doing daily blogs? Probably not, but I’ll try to get out of the cave more often.

Here’s a description of the book by Tim Hallinan:

MAKING STORY: TWENTY-ONE WRITERS ON HOW THEY PLOT

A bunch of fine crime writers who, among them, have written more than 100 novels, talk about their plotting process.  Following each essay there's a brief excerpt from a book by that writer and, at the end, a round table discussion about basic issues/challenges.  The writers are Brett Battles, Cara Black, Lisa
Brackmann, Rachel Brady, Rebecca Cantrell, Jeffrey Cohen, Meredith Cole, Bill Crider, Jeremy Duns, Leighton Gage, Gar Anthony Haywood, Wendy Hornsby, Debbi Mack, Mike Orenduff, Stephen Jay Schwartz, Zoe Sharp,Jeffrey Siger, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Kelli Stanley, Michael Stanley, and I.
I really think it's a good resource, even if I did edit it, and it's cheap, too.  It's at http://amzn.to/OmB1zO.