Welcome
Welcome to my web site, where you'll discover some of the ways that a writer works and how a writer thinks: how some stories come to be.
When I was growing up I yearned to be a baseball player or a writer — especially a mystery writer. I had no thought at all of writing about baseball, and certainly not about women in baseball. But things turned out otherwise.
Once I was an adult the decision of what to write first was difficult. I opted for a baseball novel first, a mystery novel second. Thus She's on First (Contemporary Books) and Dirty Proof (Crown Publishing) were my first two novels. At the same time, I was writing nonfiction and also children's books. I savored the years of discovering and writing about the history of women who played hardball — their stories are presented in Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball (Harcourt). On the children's end of the scale I had a blast selecting idioms for the Waltur early readers: Waltur Buys a Pig in a Poke and Other Stories, and Waltur Paints Himself into a Corner and Other Stories, both published by Houghton Mifflin.
The world of publishing has undergone gigantic changes in the last dozen years, and one of these changes is the growth of self-publishing. Like many other writers I participate in both worlds: the world of traditional publishing and the world of do-it-yourself publishing. Since 2010 I have used self-publishing to bring out new works such as Charlie Chan's Poppa: Earl Derr Biggers and also Cookie the Cockatoo: Everything Changes. The best-selling of my self-published works is Guide to Writing the Mystery Novel: Lots of Examples, Plus Dead Bodies.
I guess it stands to reason that, because I write for many different age groups, I would one day write a YA novel. That process began in 2016 and culminated with the publication of The F Words in 2021 by City of Light Publishing.
Just as I finished writing The F Words in 2020, COVID spread across the world. I spent all of 2020 and part of 2021 writing Exit Velocity. I wrote it faster than I believed possible (but what else was there to do?). And then I set forth to publish it.
Readers, regardless of their age, enter a book through its words and get swept away by its story. When you love a book, its characters live with you forever. I hope that some of my writing may live with you. Thank you for visiting.