When I was a kid I used to read what were called the funnies. Smilin’ Jack, Dick Tracy, Mandrake the Magician, Gasoline Alley and many, many others. They were, for the most part, serial stories, and I followed them with religious fervor. The New York Daily News building where I later worked as a copy boy gave guided tours, the highlight of which was to show us what was happening in the future to our favorite “funny” characters. Then came comic books with stories of Superman, Batman, and on and on.     

I gave up reading them in eighth grade. By then I had switched to real books, haunted libraries, read every young boy’s adventure story on the shelves of the Stone Avenue Library in Brooklyn. Then I upgraded to the genuine classics and contemporary novels and stories. To me reading is a way of life. How can one write if one doesn’t read?

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Read more: Hey out there, what do you think about Graphic Novels?

Ever have one of those days that make you think my life is a gag, a sitcom, a dirty joke? Put it on the page! Submissions are coming in fast, but there is still time to enter the Summer 2008 Warren Adler Short Story Contest. The contest will remain open until August 15, 2008.

See complete details.…

Read more: Writing Contest is No Joke

Of all the questions asked of fiction writers, the one most common is: Where do you get your ideas? It is a crucial question that goes to the heart of the storyteller’s art. One might generalize and assert that it comes from an amalgam of one’s life’s experiences, stories told by others, books read, movies seen, dreams and fantasies, and the molten mix in the cauldron of one’s imagination. This is one writer’s attempt to pinpoint the spark that ignited the idea that became the story and its aftermath.

I was having a drink in a Pub in London with a British diplomat who was on leave from his post in the British Embassy in Peking in the mid seventies. It was at the height of the antagonism between China and the Soviet Union, and a hostile relationship existed between China and the West.

In those days, in the midst of the Cold War, we lived in a perpetual state of tension and uncertainty with the threat of a nuclear disaster always alive in our minds as an existentialist threat.…

Read more: First in a series: How I got the idea for my novel Trans-Siberian Express

One of the first things you learn as a parent is the fidelity of a promise. If you promise something to a child, you had better well keep it or he or she will bust your chops for not keeping it. This basic moral contract is the foundation of all civilized transactions.

Unfortunately such purity of intent gets short shrift in practice and the child’s view is quickly hammered by life’s experiences. In the marriage ceremony people pledge to stay together. Fifty percent renege on such a promise. In the law courts people swear on a Bible to tell the truth and often violate the oath. Contracts are written to confirm a transaction but are often broken in practice.

Sadly, the Latin phrase Caveat Emptor, “let the buyer beware,” is the more accurate interpretation of what being honest means in real life. If you truly believe in the concept that a man’s word should be his bond, you are dubbed a naïve fool.…

Read more: The Pursuit of Happiness

I hadn’t realized it, but I have been blogging for decades. I used to write a column called “Pepper on the Side” for the Queens Post, a weekly newspaper in New York. I was 22 years old, and because I was the editor, there was no one but myself to screen or edit my columns. My own youthful judgment was final. That circumstance, aside from the technical way my so-called pearls of youthful wisdom were delivered was, by any definition in today’s parlance, a blog. Frankly, I prefer the old fashioned definition of such compositions. Essay sounds a lot classier.

In these blogs of mine, like the blogs of today, I was able to rant, bluster, declaim, fulminate, rave, scold, and vociferate. I reveled in the illusion of my own importance. I was speaking my mind, telling it as it is, getting my point across, justifying my arguments against all the perceived injustices of the world, rattling my sword against other people’s supposed obtuseness and perceived ignorance.…

Read more: Blog Away, Brothers and Sisters

I no longer take anything at face value. Like Freud asking “What do women want?” I find myself asking this question without regard to gender, embellishing it further with yet other questions like: “What does he or she really mean?” or “What is he or she thinking?” or “What does he or she want me to believe?”

Perhaps being steeped in the irony of my profession as a novelist, I am getting paranoid since I have discovered that I am developing a kind of shell, an armor that is trying to protect me from manipulation. My level of distrust has expanded exponentially as I grow older. I find I am resisting all manner of attempts to persuade me about anything. As a result, I have discovered that I am subliminally blocking out all forms of commercial or political attempts at manipulating me to act in the manner that serves other people’s agendas.…

Read more: The Persuaders Are After You: A Call to Arms