Today is George Reeves’ birthday. He was born in 1914, and fifty years later, years after his death, he would be one of the most important people in the world to me. About a year and a half ago, in the wake of the July 7, 2016 ambush shootings of fourteen police officers in Dallas, Texas that left five cops dead, I was asked to contribute a piece to an anthology about American heroes.… Read the rest
The sky was just beginning to show its early morning colors when Harry and Flo unlocked the front door of the candy store on the corner of Remsen Avenue and Avenue B and carried the waiting bundles of newspapers inside. Their daily routine was well established after more than a dozen years in the store and it wasn’t much different from the one they had followed for six years before that in the old place in Queens.… Read the rest
In 2013 I was asked by the non-profit Primate Rescue Center to contribute a story to a benefit project, Panels for Primates appearing on its Act-i-vate website. I based my piece on a skewed view of a beloved childhood favorite, H.A.… Read the rest
During my time writing nonfiction books for the YA school library market, I did books on the great and the near great, including Jerry Yang (2010) for Chelsea House’s “Asian Americas of Achievement” series. That’s right, 22,000 words on a computer geek.… Read the rest
Another of the books I did for Rosen Publishing’s young adult school library series was Critical Perspectives on The Great Depression, part of a series called “Critical Anthologies of Nonfiction Writing.” It was a collection of contemporary writings tracing the arc of the Great Depression, from the stock market crash of 1929 through to the death of FDR in 1945.… Read the rest
A boy never forgets…his first nonfiction book for the school library market. Mine was a 6,000 word little beauty called, When Disaster Strikes: The Tragedy of the Titanic (Rosen Publishing, 2001). Oh, sure, there wasn’t a lot of text to her but what was there was cherce…!… Read the rest
Continue reading about Ginzburg, Iceberg, What’s the Difference?
When I was a kid, my heroes were astronauts.
I didn’t care for or follow sports, the country wasn’t, at the moment, engaged in any wars, and I knew that the heroic figures I saw in movies and on television weren’t real.… Read the rest
So you wanna be a writer, huh? Gonna sit yourself down and type out all them great stories swirling around in your head, spin epic tales, write great literature? You’ll attend literary soirees, sip sherry, and give deep, thoughtful interviews to literary journals.… Read the rest
Continue reading about Yippee-ki-yay! So You Wanna Be a Freelance Writer!
Where were you on Wednesday, January 12, 1966 at 7:29 p.m. EST? Me, I had my ass planted firmly in front of our TV set, warmed up and tuned to ABC, channel 7 in New York, ten and one half years old and breathlessly awaiting the debut of Batman, starring Adam West and Burt Ward.… Read the rest
Seventy years ago today, the German Third Reich surrendered to the Allies and the war, at least the one that had raged across Europe since 1938, ended. This is my “recreation” of VE Day 1945, excerpted from the unpublished (and likely to remain so) novel JSA: RAGNAROK, written for iBooks.… Read the rest
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