First, I’ll honour the Earth, from which I came and to which I’ll soon return. This I’ll do with my work, my sincere effort to write with technical skill and artistic substance. The spirit of my ancestors will illuminate my way through the darkness; they will guide me to an understanding of my responsibilities and…

We’re reading ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel and by ‘we’ I’m not indulging in the Royal Usage but in the perfectly ordinary sense of ‘me and the kids’. One of these days I’ll tell the story of how our little private reading group developed but today I want to share an argument that arose…

It may surprise some readers of this blog to learn that I’m Caribbean with African, European and Chinese ancestors. I’m a naturalized citizen of the United States of America and a veteran of the US Army. My first book, The Obeahman’s Dagger, was largely about Trinidad and Tobago, where I was born and grew up…

Thanks to E. A. Hennessy for this. I had no idea.

This is it folks, the final installment – the denouement. This is where I share with you the most important things I’ve learned from my grand publishing experiment. (Fanfare) No matter how good you are at English Grammar, you’re going to miss some thing, more than one something. Besides, are you really that good? You…

(Continued from previous post – Review Central: Chapter One) In the first installment of this multi-part post I detailed the way I arrived at the decision to seek professional help in my writerly endeavors. That decision was an acknowledgement that I’d have to invest some cash in the publication and marketing of my first book, The…

The book was done. You had given it everything, sitting at your computer, days on end, writing, reading, editing, re-reading and rewriting. Finally you hit the ‘Publish Now’ key and it was released to the reading public at large. What will people think, you wondered. You waited for reviews, reviews that never came. Friends you…

Writing through a difficult patch in my circumstances, head down, trying to stay focused. I’m taking stock of my strategy, not as a writer but as a self-published author. I’ve learned so far that you can’t do it alone — produce cover, set layout, proof, and market — that’s too much for one person. Oops,…

We writers live or die by our words. Not so strange then, that I’m always curious about new words and how they were birthed so you will understand that when I read a piece about the mammoth seed corporation, Monsanto and charges of ‘ecocide’, I just had to do my due diligence. The meaning of…

They used to call this self-publishing thing ‘Vanity Press Publishing’. They should still. I used to think that I could self-publish, without spending more than a few dollars; now I understand that it’s indeed possible, if you understand that ‘few’, in practice, means ‘few thousands’. I did it all for my first book — proofreading…