My novel Sorceress Kringle is live and available for purchase in the Apple audiobooks store! This is the sixth book of mine to go live for readers who prefer to consume books that way. It’s the third novel of mine to become an audiobook.

You can check out the book right here, and buy it outright for $6.99. It’s an epic fantasy novel for grown-ups—NOT KIDS—that imagines that Santa Claus is actually a woman, and has very good reasons for hiding her identity…

Back in the 1990s I stumbled across a book that changed the way I think about character—literary and real-life characters. The book was a little something called We’ve Had a 100 Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse. It’s a series of conversations between a journalist, Michael Ventura, and the great Jungian psychologist, James Hillman.

One portion of their conversation blew my mind. It has to do with how we become the people we are. In the western view, the present is always based on our childhoods.

Hillman says that this is our peculiar American myth. What if you read you life backward instead?

When an acorn falls from a tree, it’s coded to become a mighty oak. Great treeness is its destiny. The tiny puppy I picked out of a litter in South Carolina a year ago was destined to become a ferocious Doberman. Regal dogdom was embedded in his soul.

Why don’t humans think the same way about themselves?

A while back I wrote about how I came to buy and read the hardcover version of The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris, when it was first published 35 years ago. (Yes, it really was that long ago.) I was only 23 years old at the time, and not really earning enough money to buy hardcover novels on a regular basis.

But as I explain in this post for SleuthSayers, the mystery writers blog, sometimes just the right review can send you rushing to a bookstore.

In my case, it was an article in The New York Times that convinced me that this was the right book for me…

I’m a frustrated artist. I was into both painting and writing when I was a kid. When the time came to pick a college, I rolled the dice and went with a writing major. Guess it turned out okay, but I’m still strongly attracted to art of all kinds, especially illustrations. It’s a great form—often representational, but still demanding technical mastery.

A few months back, I did a post for SleuthSayers about how mystery writers can actually own a piece of art that once graced their stories in major mystery magazines. This is somewhat inside baseball, I admit, but it shakes down like this…

I’ve written before about the book recommendation site, Shepherd.com, which enlists the help of authors, not algorithms, to share great books with fellow readers. My wife, Denise Kiernan, shared a new list with Shepherd, which is up as today. It’s tied to her trio of books on the subject of Thanksgiving and gratitude. The list is entitled:

The best books on gratitude that make every day feel like Thanksgiving

All but one of the books she’s recommending are for adults. That makes four lists she’s contributed to Shepherd. The others are, in no particular order…

When a kid gets hooked on a topic like number patterns or math in nature, you just want to feed that excitement because you don’t know where it is going to lead. Teachers, parents, and librarians often ask me to recommend books about Fibonacci beyond my own.

To that end, I’ve compiled what I hope is a pretty good Fibonacci bibliography. It contains books for kids, adults, and even serious mathematicians. I’m parking this list on the blog with the expectation that I’ll revise it as new books come along. The link is easily shareable if you want to shoot it to a friend or colleague.

Some years ago, I told the story of how, as an adult, I reconnected with a writer I’d loved as a kid. The writer was Clifford B. Hicks, who penned a fun series about a kid inventor named Alvin Fernald. The series ran for 10 books, and inspired a Wonderful World of Disney TV movie.

I didn’t realize when I moved to North Carolina that Mr. Hicks lived about 40 minutes away. I wrote him a note and we exchanged a few emails, never meeting before he passed away.

I revisited the story a few months ago in a blog post I did for SleuthSayers. I think it’s little tighter than my previous take on the story. If you are looking for a wholesome mystery series to get a kid—probably a boy—hooked, you might want to…

As a follow-up to Denise’s book birthday announcement yesterday, I thought I’d share two articles I have written in the past on the subject of Edgar Allan Poe and his editor, Sarah Josepha Hale, the so-called Mother of Thanksgiving. It’s an interesting story because Hale in the 19th century Hale was the editor of the largest magazine in nation. And it was a women’s magazine, exclusively.

Poe is not known for writing for women, specifically, or even men, but scaring the shinola out of all genders equally…

My wife, Denise Kiernan, launches a new book today. This title marks the third book in a row that she has written on the subject of Thanksgiving and gratitude. The first was for adults, the second was a picture book for little kids, and the new one is for middle grade students.

Up front, let me say that these books have very little to do with the retelling of the story of the Pilgrims and their encounter with Native Americans in 1621. That story has been told about as many times as it has been debunked.

No—Denise’s books focus primarily on how Thanksgiving became a holiday in the United States. It’s centered on the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, an influential 19th-century magazine editor who lobbied five U.S. presidents to get Turkey Day declared as an official federal holiday. All the presidents ignored her but one: Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War that nearly destroyed a nation…

It’s also probably the only recent book that tells the somewhat unbelievable story of the bizarre bond between the dainty, so-called Mother of Thanksgiving, and America’s first creepmeister, Edgar Allan Poe! I won’t spoil it for you.

Here are all the books in one place. Please to look! Please to buy!

I received confirmation late yesterday that Amazon had finally resolved the issue in which one of my book covers went missing, and was replaced with the image of a stack of mens’ trousers. (See image below.)

I carefully clicked through to all of Amazon’s international stores to make sure that what the KDP rep was telling me was accurate. It was.

All told, the problem took from 9/8/23 to 9/24/23 to resolve. So I only had to look like an idiot—and lose potential sales—for 16 days!