Interviews and appearances on the craft of writing: process, discipline, creativity, and the working habits behind a hundred-plus published books.
MemoirsYbor City was a company town built by a cigar manufacturer in 1885, run through mutual aid societies that owned their own hospitals, and used by Jose Marti to fund a revolution. For a writer it is the densest square…
Book MarketingWriting at the beach mostly does not work, and the failures are predictable. What the coast is good for is the other half of the job: the thinking and the deciding.
Book MarketingTampa has better rooms to work in than Pinellas does, distributed differently: a bookstore in an 1891 stable, a university library, a 1926 movie palace, and the historic district. The trade is that Tampa costs you a drive.
Book MarketingSafety Harbor has more workable places to write than towns four times its size. The library for long stretches, the waterfront for the stuck paragraph, Philippe Park for the structural think.
Book MarketingThe Poynter Institute owns the Tampa Bay Times, because Nelson Poynter willed it to them so no chain could buy the paper. It is also where much of the modern craft of nonfiction writing was taught and written down.
Book MarketingFor fifty years in Ybor City, cigar workers paid a man out of their own wages to sit on a platform and read novels aloud while they worked. They elected him, voted on the books, and struck when the owners…
Book MarketingA man built an eight-story pink hotel on St. Pete Beach because a woman in Spain was forbidden to marry him. It opened in 1928, three hundred percent over budget, and the Fitzgeralds spent a week there in 1930.
Book MarketingFive mineral springs in Safety Harbor have been sold as a cure for five hundred years, starting when Hernando de Soto decided he had found the Fountain of Youth. There is a lesson in it for anyone writing a book.
MemoirsThere is a Tocobaga temple mound in a county park in Safety Harbor, and the park is named for the Frenchman who showed up in 1842. Which name ends up on the sign is the useful thing to think about.
MemoirsPinellas County is full of people who did something substantial somewhere else and then moved here, and almost none of them have written it down. The reasons are always the same three, and all three are wrong.
Book MarketingPinellas County has more writing groups than most people realize, mostly meeting in library rooms. The useful skill is telling a group that will make you better from one that will correct your commas for two years.
Book MarketingJack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg in 1969 at forty-seven, in a concrete block ranch house in Disston Heights, leaving an estate valued at ninety-one dollars. On the Road has never stopped selling.
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