Winnie the Pooh Got Me Into Fiction
Ask what got me into fiction in the first place and I’ll tell you in four words. The World of Pooh by A.A. Milne. No other book comes close. My mother read that volume to me a hundred times when…
Thank You for Your Order
Go Figure: Musings from the Mind of Rob Wilstein “In December, (Amazon) patented ‘anticipatory shopping,’ which will use your shopping data to put items that you don’t yet know you want to buy, but will soon enough, on a truck…
15 Ways to Revive the Writer Within
For those of us without many writing credits to our name and audacious enough to attempt longer-length fiction, the mantel of “writer” is heavy and may be hard to own completely once we stick our toes into the competitive world…
A Little Perspective
This is what I did this weekend: walked the dogs into Harvard Square, cleaned up my kitchen, shopped on Newbury St., read the Sunday New York Times, watched the first three episodes of Orange is the New Black, and booked…
My Beef with Silver Linings Playbook
Catching up on the movies I missed last year slaving over my novel draft, last night I watched Silver Linings Playbook. The film is about a young man, Pat Solitano, from a working class Italian family in north Philadelphia, who…
Cardinal Sins of Character Development
Nothing makes me stop reading a novel faster than a poorly realized protagonist. Why? Because that character is the guide to a new world, and if he lacks credibility the whole story does too. Below, I have listed some examples…