In my last article I wrote about a man who’d gone through a horrible divorce last year. Me, having been twice divorced, offered him this sage, Dalai Lama like advice. One day, you will wake up in your new apartment and you will head outside with your morning coffee and experience a happiness and peace like never before. Very recently he told me this exact thing happened to him. He also thanked me for my words of wisdom, if you want to call them that.

Today, he has found a new love, and I’d wager the mortgage he’s going to…

A buddy of mine went through a nasty divorce last year. Almost every late afternoon I’d see him stumble into our local pub, his face pale, hair disheveled, eyes wide and bloodshot. In the words of the great Hemingway, he looked, “defeated.” He’d sit beside me at the bar, order a beer, and practically start crying into it.

“She’s taking me to the cleaners, Vin,” he’d lament. “But I don’t care. I just want out as fast as I can. I can’t take it anymore. The fights, the tension, the no sex. She doesn’t even do my laundry. Hasn’t in…

Maybe you’re young and broke. Or maybe you’re like me, a freelance writer and novelist who can’t always count on a steady paycheck. Whatever the case, I’ve been going to Italy for extended month to two month stays since the early 2000s. These days, I’m lucky and financially stable enough to stay in an apartment, eat out regularly, while also cooking for myself in my humble cucina (kitchen).

But there was a time when I was freelancing for pretty much any news outlet that would pay me. That meant writing breaking news and paying blogs for RT (Russian Television) and…

Bookbaby recently published an article detailing the trials and tribulations of some world famous authors. Authors whom one would assume lived carefree lives of riches and unimpeded success.

But did you know Herman Melville’s career was destroyed by a shoddy editing? Apparently, Moby Dick was butchered by its English editor, with whole sections being moved around, and some being excised altogether since they were deemed politically incorrect (I kid you not) or just unnecessary.

These edits happened without Melville’s permission which was common in the mid-1800s. In the end, Moby Dick was so poorly received it only sold about 3K…

By now you would have heard the POTUS, a Republican, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his recent Israel/UAE peace deal. At the same time, rumors abound that the radical left portion of the Democratic Party is promising major acts of violence come election day should Biden not win by a landslide. How strange. I’d always thought of the far left as the peace, love, and understanding flower children, while the far right were the war mongers, the gun nuts, the skin head Romper Stompers.

Oh how times change.

Radical outfits like the George Soros sponsored Move…

One major aspect of the craft that fiction writers seem to struggle over, is creating convincing characters. I’m not blowing my own horn here when I say I don’t have any trouble at all coming up with the personalities who inhabit my books, novellas, and stories. In fact, creating them is rather easy.

Why? Because they already exist.

There is simply, no reason in the world to invent a main or supporting character out of thin air, especially when they exist all around you in the form of friends, family, and even enemies. …

Anyone who tells you being a writer is a secure occupation is lying. The last thing my parents wanted to hear 30 years ago, is that I planned on becoming a writer for my living. This was a especially hard on them since, up to that time, I’d been groomed to take over a family commercial construction business. While I would have been the third generation to enter into it, sad (or not so sad) to say, it just wasn’t in my blood.

Enter the writing gig. Having spent a good amount of time in an office I knew what…