I’m now in the midst revising the manuscript of my next book, to address suggestions (and ridicule) by my editor. Me being me, I’m pretty much rewriting the whole thing. I am a compulsive rewriter. From where I sit now I see four complete drafts of the book on my office floor, amounting to several . . .
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The times being what they are, I recently decided that it might be prudent to diversify from writing books into some other kind of industry. I quickly hit on the ideal thing: Sea salt. Since “disrupting” markets is apparently the thing these days, as opposed to the old fashioned concept of merely building better products than . . .
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At last we have emptied our Seattle house of all our belongings. We drove carloads of things to Goodwill and gave some to friends, but all the rest are on a truck headed east, or so we hope. Given the chaos of this move, it is hard to be certain. There were delays, dropped boxes, . . .
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Before beginning the long process of packing up our Seattle house for the final phase of our move to New York City, we resolved to bring as little excess baggage with us as possible, and so, archeologists of the heart, we began spending a part of each day going through family artifacts dating back a . . .
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So, I was playing tennis recently out in Queens, and afterward walked to my subway stop, an elevated concrete plateau above Queens Boulevard. A train had just departed, leaving the platform empty save for a body sprawled on the concrete, a young man lying in a fetal position. Like an idiot, I asked him, “you okay?,” . . .
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Whenever I publish a book, I invariably find that it ends up accompanied to market by a memoir written by an author who claims to have gone to heaven and returned. These books are very popular, so much so that there is now a name for the genre: “heaven tourism.” At one point last year, . . .
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In order to get a better understanding of the nature of transatlantic travel for my book, Dead Wake, my wife and I decided to take a voyage on the Queen Mary 2 from New York to Southampton, England. The ship departed the Brooklyn cruise terminal precisely on my birthday, and promptly sailed into a Force . . .
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From time to time a reader will ask me, who comes up with the titles of my books, and do I have any say in the process? I am happy to assert that in fact, for better or worse, the titles of all seven of my books have been my inventions. That is about all they . . .
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I do not like to fly. It has nothing to do with fear of heights or being separated from the ground. Most of the time I have no problem with the fundamental concept of being in a metal tube a few miles above the earth held aloft solely by the physical forces of velocity, drag, . . .
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Recently, I made the decision to become a corporation–to be precise, a Delaware corporation, with an S election, registered to operate in the states of New York and Washington. This is a new thing for me. I am deeply averse to paperwork, and being a corporation will bring me a forest of paper, but my . . .
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