Where to Write in Tampa
Tampa 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.
Tag: research
Getting the facts right without drowning in them. Historical and biographical novelists on how much research a book needs and when to stop.
PhotographyWriting at the Beach Mostly Does Not Work
Writing 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.
HistoryYbor City Is the Densest Square Mile of Material Here
Ybor 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…
Memoir WritingFinding a Writing Group Worth Sitting In
Pinellas 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.
HistoryYou Retired Here With a Life Behind You
Pinellas 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.
HistoryThe Mound Under the Picnic Tables
There 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.
Book MarketingFive Hundred Years of Selling the Same Water
Five 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.
Authority Through AuthorshipThe Men Paid to Read Novels Aloud in Tampa
For 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…
Authority Through AuthorshipThe School That Owns a Newspaper
The 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.
Authority Through AuthorshipKerouac’s Last Address, Twenty Minutes From My Desk
Jack 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.
HistoryThe East Lake Community Library, and the Room That Taught Me Craft
The East Lake Community Library in Palm Harbor is where the East Lake Writers' Workshop met, in a side room off the main floor, and where I sat every other week for years while Deanna Bennett ran the table.
Memoir WritingThe Clearwater Main Library, and Why Writers Should Know Its Hours
The Clearwater Main Library is a landmark building with maker studios, a digitization station, and a harbor view. It is also closed on weekends, and part of it may become something else.