Shakespeare – A Wordsmith For All Seasons
Shakespeare: A Wordsmith For All Seasons Shakespeare's unmatched linguistic prowess allowed him to coin and popularize a staggering number of words. It's estimated that he introduced around 1,700 words to the English language—at least, his plays are the first recorded...
Shakespeare’s Othello – A Prayer Before Dying
I am often asked what's my favorite Shakespeare play. It's like asking me to pick my favorite ice cream. Sure, there are favs, but it's ice cream - the worst I've had is terrific. Having performed about two-thirds of the canon, any list of mine would have Much Ado and...
Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet: Comedy Subverted, Tragedy Reinvented
“For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” William Shakespeare’s The Tragedie Of Romeo And Juliet reinvented theatrical Tragedy by taking standard Comedic elements and subverting them, with unhappy outcomes. This makes Romeo & Juliet...
Recent Posts
Virtual Blog Tour!
This week and next I'm touring the interwebs, collecting reviews, giving interviews, and writing guest posts for 20 different websites, all through the auspices of the amazing and wonderful Amy Philips Bruno over at Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours....
Writing Process? What Writing Process?
One of my readers, Kate, was inspired by something I said over on my Facebook page, and she wrote a post about teaching her students Creative Writing. In a coda, she posted this: I'm fascinated by the process authors use to write because I want to learn how they...
Prolific? Not so much.
I've been asked, due to how much I'm able to produce, if I sleep. Yeah, I do. I need 7 hours, or I'm pretty useless. And my productivity has plummeted since I became a father (that's not a complaint). Back when I banged out The Master Of Verona, I had...
Teaser 1 – The Prince’s Doom
Colossus – The Historical Note
This is something I weighed including in the first Colossus novel. I think it will appear in the third, outside of the text. It's an historical note to set the scene for the whole arc of the series. I wrote it at the urging of my agent, who saw it as necessary...
Free Copy of Colossus: Stone & Steel – TODAY ONLY!
We're only a couple months away from the second installment of this series about the Roman-Jewish wars of the first century AD, leading to the destruction of the Second Temple and the building of the Colosseum! So start reading COLOSSUS: STONE & STEEL now so...
A Note From A Friend
I got this in my Facebook inbox this morning, from a buddy of mine. He and I met doing a production of Romeo & Juliet, and have since done a few more. He loved The Master Of Verona, and I knew last week he was closing in on the end of Falconer. Evidently he went...
New Short Story Collection for Halloween
Now available - SINCERITY & OTHER SCARY TALES! Longtime followers of this blog will recognize the title story from this collection. Sincerity was my Halloween offering four years ago, reprinted last year for all my new readers. Now it appears to headline a...
Circular Thinking
One of the reasons I love teaching is that it forces me to distill and confront my knowledge, and refine it into sensible bits. Another reason I love it is because the students are often smarter than I am. I don't teach much, mostly because I resent the...
Love is Love
Here's a guest piece I wrote for Bilerico.com that ran last Sunday. I’m getting some lovely praise for my new novel, HER MAJESTY’S WILL. I wrote it as a tongue-in-cheek spy story starring Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe, and it seems to be received...
