I've been writing and editing for a long time. A while ago, I got together with Sandra Newman, and we put everything we had figured out reading and working on hundreds, possibly thousands, of published and unpublished novels, and put it all into How Not To Write A Novel. It's sort of an encyclopedia of mistakes every beginning writer makes. It's very funny. Really. You can read some excerpts at hownottowriteanovel.com. I can't guarantee you'll write a good novel if you read it, but it would be very hard not to write a better novel.


I used to review a lot: many, many books for Kirkus Reviews, and also for newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. So I have all these reviews sitting around, and I thought I'd post some of them here, which I'm mentioning to explain why some of my reviews read exactly like reviews that were written for Kirkus.