Author James Hankins being interviewed in September 2015 about his thriller story The Prettiest One for Kindle Most Wanted, Amazon’s community for fans, mysteries and suspense novels. (Photo permission and courtesy of James Hankins.) This blog post is the second of a two–part interview with author James Hankins. Following the format I used last…
–Author James Hankins. (Photo permission and courtesy of James Hankins.) My wife Carolyn is a voracious reader. She lately has pored through all five of James Hankins’ novels. “You’ve got to read this author,” she kept telling me. “Well, why do you like him so much?” I asked her recently. “His stories have a…
Prepping the Vegetable Garden. (Credit: photo by Keith Carreiro, June 2016, Swansea, Massachusetts.) The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath I thought that once my college classes were over for the spring semester the time, formerly spent in preparing classes, getting there and back,…
Author David Estes: “Signing books with Bailey the cat—in this one I’m signing hundreds of bookmarks ahead of a Library book signing event. Our cat, Bailey, is ‘helping,’ which basically consists of her hitting all the bookmarks off the table.” (Photo permission and courtesy of David Estes. Credit: Photo by Adele Estes, June 21, 2014,…
Author David Estes: “First copy of The Moon Dwellers – this is me holding the very first copy of The Moon Dwellers, the book that changed my life!” (Photo permission and courtesy of David Estes. Credit: Photo by Adele Estes, July 15, 2012, taken on the North Shore of Hawaii). It’s been great speaking…
Raindrops falling onto the Surface of a Pond. (Credit: Keith Carreiro, May 2016.) We are having a lot of rainy, gray weather in our area lately, as the leading photo to this blog post visually attests. It seems that we have gone from a very mild winter, especially in contrast to the one the year…
Flowering Japanese Tree Lilac [Syringia reticulata]. (Credit: Keith Carreiro, April 2016.) For some reason this week, several friends of mine who are beginning writers have shared with me their experiences in being approached by vanity presses. To a person, they all told me how it “creeped them out”, especially the manner in which each…
Castlebay: Fred Gosbee and Julia Lane in Library Park, Bath, Maine. Credit: Martin Kummer. (Photo permission and courtesy of Castlebay.) Fred Gosbee grew up, fittingly, in Harmony, Maine. He was immersed from the day he was conceived in the traditional music of his family, whose elder members played and sang Irish and Scottish songs….
Marshall Dodge on the Maine Coast. Photo permission and courtesy of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. I memorized my first “tall tale” when I was eight–years–old. It was 1958. My Uncle Bob had made a fallout shelter. It was the height of the Cold War. He wasn’t taking any chances. On March 11th of…
Painting by Mauritz Frederik Hendrik de Haas (1832–1895), Dutch–American painter. Beating to Windward in the English Channel (1872). Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Art Collection of New Bedford Free Public Library. (Photo by Janice Hodson, Curator of Art, March 2016.) When I think of the ocean, especially the areas of the Atlantic sweeping away…