James D. Best

Writers can be a competitive bunch and can say nasty things about others in their profession. A good barb needs to be pithy and clever. Her...

Today, NFReads published my author interview . They ask good questions, so if you want to know my dark secrets, take a gander. Just kidding....

Curiosity.com published a list of writing tips from Mark Twain. Now, Twain never actually published a list, but his letters provide...

Platforms, branding, franchise, fans, discoverability. There are many words bandied about that all represent the same thing: how does an au...

Joseph Heller's Outline for Catch 22 How much planning should there be for a novel? Should there be an outline? Should you compose ...

Nelson DeMille The Barnes and Noble Book Blog published a list of 25 odd, clever, or humorous book dedications . Ever since Cathedral...

Dead people publish new books all the time. Some of these books are unfinished manuscripts. Others are ghostwritten from scratch to take ad...

I recently read Stephen Hunter’s, The Third Bullet , which is a novel about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Through the years, I have re...

My wife and I just finished a perfect vacation in Southern California. Our daughter and son’s families have returned to their homes and eve...

Many seem to believe if they just got a proper set of instructions, they could be a good writer. Many famous writers like Mark Twain, Georg...

I was unaware that my favorite library once banned a book by my favorite author. In 1885, the Concord Free Public Library banned The Advent...

Some people are visual. I'm not one of them. But I appreciate good design, even if I'm incapable of drawing a straight line with a r...

Shane is one of my favorite Western films. The Jack Schaefer book is also one of my favorite Western novels. There are great films and...

Mark Twain didn't like James Fenimore Cooper’s writing. Wait, that was far too mild of a sentence. In his article “Fenimore Cooper'...

Harry Truman is an interesting character, and David McCullough presents an engaging picture of our 33 rd president. McCullough is thor...

Western author JR Sanders posted to Facebook a link to “The Top 20 Literary Quotes About Short Stories,”  at Writers Write , a South Africa...

Kim McDougall of Castelane, Inc. recently wrote to  ask for permission to re-publish  on the new  Castlelane website   an article I wrote f...