She wasn’t going to say it out loud, not at first. But finally, Alice Elliott had to admit what she wanted most for her film, THE COLLECTOR OF BEDFORD STREET: to win an Academy Award. At the time, Alice was speaking with members of a support group. She was in the middle of a marketing…

“Don’t laugh,” I told him. David and I were at our favorite Korean spa in Flushing, Queens. And I’d picked a quiet area, where people could lie out on cushy chaise longues to rest or sleep. We were all alone. He knew something was coming; he just didn’t know what. “I think we should get…

Many artists are like crows. You know, the big black ones that scavenge objects out of fields. We have a habit of finding little moments in time, little word droppings, a marble stone, a funny twig, that we love as if they were diamonds. And we scarf them away for use later on, in stories…

If you went into a coffee shop in New York City before the pandemic, chances are you’d have found somebody hunched over something that they were writing, maybe in a notebook, maybe on a laptop. They wouldn’t be much to look at, for the most part. We writers are like rats in big cities. Everywhere.…

20 FEB. 2021 Cher Janet, Saw that our interview posted on the Women Writers, Women’s Books site. And while I stand by every word that I said, people are likely to get the wrong idea about me. Yes, I recounted many things about my life in your novel, THE JUICE. But people who have yet…

Lately I’ve been thinking about the power of “no.” By that, I don’t mean someone who refuses to stop making advances on an alarmed date—or “No don’t touch that hot pot, you frickin’ idiot.” Instead I am referring to people who have been my mentors, who raised their hand in a big stop sign, making…

I want to tell you the truest thing about me on this day, of all days, when my novel THE JUICE is being released. It’s something that I rarely talk about to anyone but close friends and family, because there’s a sting to it. It has to do with this guy, pictured above, David Chachere.…

Several years ago at a cocktail gathering in Hong Kong, I mentioned that I was going to Malaysia on vacation in a few months. The people I was with were seasoned TV executives who worked in the Pacific Rim and had traveled extensively throughout it. Without hesitation, they recommended that I climb Mt. Kinabalu. And…

It’s no mean feat to catch a glimpse of Jarat Ellington, let alone interview him. The guy has pretty much erased every image of himself that was published on the Net. Privacy is one of his abiding obsessions in life. And I suppose that’s one of the reasons why he was so intent on sabotaging…

I had an idea in mind for this week’s post—something funny and a little frivolous. But right now, the people around me are so stressed out by events in all our lives. So many of us seem to be stumbling to find the focus and level of enthusiasm they need to put their best foot…