CHAPTER ONE: LAST WEDNESDAY Maura’s alarm was set for 6 a.m., but her bladder went off at 5:28. Determined not to disturb her husband and the cat, she slipped silently out of bed. No, slipped wasn’t the word. Slipped sounds like a ballerina floating between rippling waves of satin to the accompaniment of flutes and …
Well, okay, not exactly groupies, but fans. My Facebook pal, Kate, saw a woman pull a copy of Revenge of the Soccer Moms out of her bag on a commuter train in suburban Chicago, and started a conversation. Other people sitting nearby got in on it, and now they have a book club thing going on the …
Thanks to Kate Shepherd Communications, I was asked to appear on the Morning News on Monday, July 3, 2017. Lindy Thackson made me feel comfortable, and she was so prepared! They even had snatched a photo of my kids from Facebook, and inserted it at an opportune time. The segment was less than 3 minutes, …
Discovering the classes at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival changed my life. I had been working on ROTSM for at least two years, and felt better about my writing than I should have. That’s hindsight, of course. I’ll skip the first part of a long story, and just say that I experienced an unexpected rejected …
I only wish I knew enough to write that book. I waste countless hours of my life enjoying social media, but now I need to make it a tool in my quest for world domination and book sales. There goes all my fun. My teenage son, Mikey, is trying to explain the point of Instagram, and how …
When I started writing Revenge of the Soccer Moms, I fantasized about lucrative publishing advances, movie rights, and national book tours. Okay, I still do. But I chose self-publishing over continuing to search for an agent who could sell my book. I had an agent who couldn’t sell it, or, to be fair, an earlier version of it, …
I did not spring from the womb able to write a novel. I didn’t spring from college, either, nor from decades writing video scripts and commercials. I learned the fine points of writing fiction, first from teachers like Peter J. Welling, and then I discovered the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. If you want to be a writer, and …
The “bad guy” in my novel is loosely based on someone who lived in my old neighborhood, but so loosely based that I never worried about hearing from his team of attorneys. But I got a piece of excellent advice from a writing instructor: If you want to write about a real guy, make sure to mention that …
People get half-way through Revenge of the Soccer Moms before they realize that nobody in the book plays the game. Nobody is even maimed by a well-kicked soccer ball. I’ll tell you what I tell them. Keep reading. It’s in there.