Sitting in a “Pay lounge” at Seoul, Korea’s fabulous Incheon Airport, one of the best airports in the world. I had a six hour layover, and for $21 you get a food and beverage buffet and other basic ammenities. It’s crowded today, but what the hell, the two glasses of red wine I’ll drink would easily cost $21 if I bought them at a bar here. Free wi-fi is all over this airport, and I need to find the free local phones so I can call some good friends in Seoul and apologize for not having enough time to jump on a KAL limmo bus and jam in to see them for lunch. I like this airport because it’s beautiful, user friendly and they provide many free services. The wi-fi enabled me to post the following review from the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, where I’ll be signing copies […]

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This review is from a reader unknown to the author. Thanks to them for taking the time and the thoughtful effort to post it on Amazon. “A collective pathology of quasi post-traumatic stress hung like a cloud over the delta.” Set in New Orleans five months after Katrina, Kovacs’ mystery features ex-cop Cliff St. James, nearly homeless in a city known for its surfeit of crime and its attendant vices, all thrown into chaos since the storm, the lack of resources available and the unmet needs of countless people made homeless by the hurricane. St. James has found shelter in his badly damaged dojo, his martial arts students virtually non-existent, his future looking as bleak as the city. His last act as a detective was the night Katrina hit in full force, the scene of a murder at Sam Sui’s Tiki Hut, any evidence of the crime- and the body- […]

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As I become a short-timer here on this security contract in Central Asia, I’m trying to do as much prep now as possible so I can hit the ground running when I get back to the States in January. Hope to see as many of you as possible during the book tour, and thanks for your support. Since we’re getting close to the Holiday Season, please visit my “Charities” page and donate generously, if possible. Have a great one, Ed BOOK TOUR SCHEDULE FOR STORM DAMAGE January 10, 2012   7:00PM                                                                                      Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., W. Hollywood, Ca 90069                              310.659. 3110   January 11, 2012  7:00PM The Poisoned Pen, 4014 N. Goldwater Blvd. #101, Scottsdale, AZ, US http://www.poisonedpen.com/   January 12, 2012  6:00PM Clues Unlimited, 3146 East Fort Lowell Road , Tucson, AZ, US http://cluesunlimited.com/    January 15, 2012  4:00PM Left Bank Books, 399 North Euclid Ave., St. Louis, MO, US […]

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This first week of November, 2011, I find myself about four months into a security contract in Central Asia.  It’s cold, dreary, and bleak.  My room is nice and warm, however; wish I had more time to spend in it.  The food is boring but edible, except for when we get food poisoning. I spend time writing when I get the chance.  And I just had one of those creative spurts where in a very short period of time, I outlined the plot for a new Cliff St. James novel.  My crime fiction novels STORM DAMAGE and GOOD JUNK will be published by St. Martin’s Minotaur.  This new one, right now untitled, will hopefully be the third in the series. And that all ties into an online round-table I’m participating in called, “What Moved You to Write Your First Novel?”  There are some interesting thoughts here from some fine writers.  […]

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Technically, I became a professional writer at age nineteen.  That’s when I sold my first piece to my university newspaper.  It was new and exciting to see my name in print.  A little later I became a staff writer and columnist and would get angry when some overworked, underpaid staffer pulling an all-nighter in paste-up would screw up and drop my by-line.  The pay was too meager to be a concern, it was all about the ego trip back then.  Hopefully, I wasn’t too insufferable, but I doubt it. Getting paid is the measure of being a professional.  When amateur painters start getting paid for their work, they transform from pursuing a hobby or passion to engaging in commerce.  This doesn’t make them Michelangelo, it just makes them a professional painter.  Remember, I said that getting paid ‘technically’ makes you a professional.  I functioned for years after college working professionally […]

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I recently took part in an online roundtable with other novelists on the International Thriller Writer’s association Website http://t.co/XeEvdVgn discussing the topic of “Where Do Story Ideas Come From?” I’m not even sure it’s possible to explain that exactly.  We all seemed to agree that we knew when we had a good one.  When you strike gold, idea-wise, those plots tend to grab hold of a writer and not let go.  Maybe the idea sprang from a newspaper headline or a person we met or a situation we witnessed. But what about the writer who sits down at her/his desk and just starts thinking?  And comes up with a great idea.  How do you really explain that, except by calling it the Creative Process, whatever that means? Once upon a time writers spoke of have a “Muse,” and while that word did come up once in the roundtable discussion, it […]

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Back in 2001 I started getting the germ of an idea for a story to write.  The vague notion tugging at the fringes of my consciousness was like the first bubble in a pot of stew that would come to boil.             The story felt like action/adventure.  No surprise there as at that point in my career I’d written at least half a dozen action screenplays, all of which had either been produced or optioned.             As the idea faucet opened wider I began to ‘feel into’ the form – was this going to be another screenplay?  I’d wanted to write a novel for many years and had begun but abandoned (uncharacteristically) an earlier start on a novel.             So I was a bit leery to go the novel route, but I was tired of writing screenplays.  Soon it became clear that the emerging idea was going to be my […]

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I once attended a luncheon in downtown Los Angeles sponsored by the Japan- America Society. Approximately forty World War II Japanese fighter pilots – men who had flown the feared “Zero” – had come to California to participate in a series of friendship events. Old adversaries practicing the art of forgiveness and making new friendships with former enemies is a good thing. At one point during the luncheon, participants were urged to mingle, take photos, and garner each others’ signatures on a commemorative poster we’d all been given. A Japanese gentlemen about eighty years old, with clear eyes and a ready smile, approached as I sat at my table and began speaking to me in Japanese. Thankfully, the man next to me was able to translate, and I proceeded to hear a fascinating tale of a very lucky man. One fateful day during the war, the elderly man now standing […]

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The conventional wisdom has long been that sensitive military technologies – developed and paid for with your tax dollars -are 10 to 20 years ahead of similar technologies commonly available in the civilian sector.             Sometimes, as in the case of the Internet, which was first developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) scientists, the technology becomes declassified and ‘trickles down’ to the public.             Occasionally, the reverse happens, as in 2000 when the Defense Department essentially bailed out the Iridium Satellite consortium that provided sat phone coverage globally to the most remote areas of the earth.  In this case the military wanted to adapt existing civilian technology to their own use.             That brings us to remote viewing, a protocol developed with secret government funding.  But remote viewing is just a dry, techno-term for clairvoyance, a technology utilized globally by civilians long before there was such an entity […]

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Many  years ago I was on my way to Vietnam after working in Thailand, but it was TET, the lunar new year holiday that brings everything in countries like Vietnam to a screeching halt. I decided to stop first in Cambodia, a country still reeling from the genocide of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and a place I was told would be less influenced by the major holiday. Through serendipity, on my second day in the country, with little effort on my part, I was offered a job teaching journalism as part of an NGO program out of New York.  The students would primarily be professional journalists from Burma, India, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, all gathering in Phnom Penh to study the fundamentals of journalism, Western style.  The Laotian and Vietnamese reporters were shocked to learn we in the West don’t editorialize in page one news stories!  My stay […]

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