A few changes coming to this blog in the next couple of months: 1. Jeff Simon, our version of Steve Jobs, has been reconfiguring the site to make it more video-friendly. We’ll have a new look soon (or as soon as Jeff can whip it together.) The plan is to do a lot more video posts and even video series. Jeff is also redesigning the look of the site to work better on mobile devices. I hate the term “content.” But, what the hell, here is some of the (I can’t say the word) we’ve got coming up: 1. I’m…

Black Irish Books is the little publishing company that Shawn and I operate, alongside our various day jobs. When I say little, I mean little. So far we’ve only brought out stuff written by me. That started to change, though, about two and a half years ago. If you’ve been reading the Monday and Friday posts in this space (the ones about my researching The Lion’s Gate in Israel), you know that I had met and become friends with Giora Romm, the Israel Air Force’s first fighter-pilot ace. One day when Giora and I were driving somewhere he casually said…

About six weeks ago, Seth Godin (Tribes, Linchpin, Squidoo, The Icarus Deception, HugDug.com) ran an announcement on his blog. He invited 15 people to apply to spend a week with him this summer in a seminar for young artists and entrepreneurs. Tuition free. My first thought when I read this was, “Wow, what a generous offer! Is Seth a great guy or what?” My second thought was, “What a life-changer this could be for a young person who was ready to profit from the experience.” A few days later I was talking to my young friend Liam Bowler. “Did you…

There are very few books on creativity that I would take with me to a desert island. One for sure is Patricia Ryan Madson’s Improv Wisdom, first published in 2005. Patricia taught improvisation at Stanford to SRO classes for twenty-eight years. Her slender, highly concentrated book (shorter than The War of Art) cites thirteen maxims for aspiring comics and actors who dare to get up onstage without a net and wing it. What is fascinating to me is that every one of these principles applies with equal power to writing, particularly fiction writing. 1. “Say yes.” I had never heard…

This week for me is packed with interviews, getting the word out for The Lion’s Gate. Looking at my calendar I see block after block of twenty minutes, thirty minutes marked down for appointments. How will I get any work done? 1. I’m gonna work in the cracks. I’ll have to find intervals. There won’t be many because what time isn’t taken up with book promotion will be devoured by personal stuff, family obligations, etc. But still there will be cracks. I tell myself, “Steve, by all rights, you should accomplish absolutely NOTHING this week. So even one page, even…

One of the questions I get asked all the time is “Why do you write about war?” It’s a good question, and for years I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t start out writing about war. For almost thirty years I wrote screenplays and novels and none of them were war-themed. In 1996, Gates of Fire (about the battle of Thermopylae) came out of me for some reason I could not (and still cannot) fathom. Six more novels about war followed. A non-fiction book about the Six Day War of 1967, The Lion’s Gate, just came out two weeks ago.…

[Today’s post is an updated version of one of the first to run on this blog. It’s one I’ve always wanted to bring back.] Chaos. The Big Bang. Crap flying everywhere. Imagine yourself back at the beginning of time. The universe is raw energy, blasting faster than light-speed in all directions. (Stay with me, this is going somewhere). What happens? As time passes—maybe only nanoseconds—electrons coalesce around nuclei. Molten matter cools; stars and planets form themselves into spheres; celestial objects find paths and settle into orbits. Order emerges. Gravity exerts its pull. Rivers form and run downhill. Seas arise. Atmospheres…

The Lion’s Gate has been out for about a week now. The book represents, for me, three years of 24/7 work and an untold tonnage of emotion. Now it’s out there in the real world, on its own. Nothing I think or say or do will have more than the most negligible influence on the way the book is received. The question for me now becomes, “How do I manage my own expectations?” For what it’s worth, here is how I think about it: First, I have been trained in the Tinseltown School of Having Your Heart Broken. It’s a…

Continuing from last week’s post: How did my friend Paul change via the process of writing and completing his first novel? I offer the following thoughts to Paul as well as to our readers, not as “lessons learned” of “the right way” or “the wrong way.” What follows are only observations. They’re subjective. I may be wrong. This is just what I saw, or what I think I saw. Let’s start with BEFORE: 1) Paul and the External World. Before the novel, Paul’s sense of well-being and self-satisfaction was tied almost exclusively to externals. He doesn’t have kids, but he…

My friend Paul just finished his first novel. He has no publisher yet. He’s still got a long way to go. But he finished that sucker. He’s done. He did it. It’s been really interesting for me to watch Paul walk through the fire. Because it is true that, for a grizzled old vet like me, the ordeal of writing does get easier over time. You forget what hell it is in the beginning. Now here’s Paul struggling through sieges of despair and self-loathing; enduring bouts of mental and emotional paralysis; undergoing his seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth nervous breakdowns, not…