3/23/07 -- I'm back from school visits in Michigan. Great trip. Great teachers doing great things with kids. Nice to see.Been working this week on the first rewrite of STORM MOUNTAIN. Have made my way to chapter 6 and so far all is going well. I'd...

3/10/07 -- Back on February19th I reported in this journal a major shift in the plot of STORM MOUNTAIN. I didn't reveal it then (got to keep the reader guessing!), but it involved the death of one of the main characters. (Heavy stuff.) Since then ...

3/06/07 -- Started my first rewrite of STORM MOUNTAIN. On a whim I tried switching from the first-person present-tense I used in the first draft to third-person past-tense. For example, "I stare in complete and total confusion," became "He stared ...

2/28/07 -- The last few days I've been at work on what is generally referred to as "promotion." For me this means designing a mailer that officially announces the publication of my new novel, A TOUGH NUT TO CRACK. (I know, I know, it's been out si...

2/23/07 -- Yahoo! I've just finished the first draft of STORM MOUNTAIN, and it feels great. True, there is a TON of work to do: research, more character development, logistics, and many many rewrites. This draft is rough in the truest sense of the...

2/21/07 -- Yesterday morning I was reading the newspaper and saw an article that almost made me drop my coffee! I had known that there were climbers missing on Mt. Hood, here in Oregon. Now the headline read that, unlike the tragedy of December in...

2/19/07 -- Oh boy, what a writing day! There I was working away, thinking I knew what was going to happen at a critical point in the plot, and suddenly I realized that I had it wrong. STORM MOUNTAIN would be much stronger if I went another way. At...

2/15/07 -- Yesterday morning, as every Valentine's Day morning, my family and I lit a candle for my father, Irving Earl Birdseye, who died on Valentine's Day, 1974 at the age of 54. On one level it is a sad moment for me, and marks the beginning o...

2/12/07 -- I'm back in Oregon and thawed out from my trip to New York City. The cold in the Big Apple was intense, with wind chills in the minus 20F range. A couple of times during the week I lost the feeling in my fingers and toes. Still, the ove...

2/3/07 -- Packing in a hurry to go to New York to meet with editors, my agent, marketing folks, publishers. If you've ever been to the Big Apple you know that it's a hopping place, and arguably the most culturally diverse city in the world. All of...

2/2/07 -- Took a day off from writing yesterday to go skiing with my daughter, Kelsey, and her boyfriend, Tyler. We drove to Mt. Hood (see photo below, the highest peak in Oregon, elevation, 11, 235 feet). Skies were blue, but the temperature was ...

1/31/07 -- Found myself feeling a bit discouraged this morning by the sluggish speed of my writing. The more I thought about the seemingly glacial pace, the more it bothered me. Within minutes I came to a grinding halt, a victim of the dreaded syn...

1/29/07 -- Action scene today, in this case a fall into a crevasse, which is a giant crack in the surface of a glacier. (See example in photo below.) It was relatively easy writing on one level, there being lots going on and so plenty to talk abou...

1/26/07 -- I was reminded again today of the importance of research in fiction writing, and the importance of sometimes putting it off. Let me explain: First of all, I'm not talking about the kind of research I did so much of in school -- for repo...

1/25/07 -- Writing takes commitment, perseverance, and lots of time. It is not about strolling in spring meadows, or lolling about in the shade of an apple tree waiting for a brilliant idea. It is about sitting in front of the computer for hours, ...

1/24/07 -- Seems I can't leave silly scenes out of a story, even a fairly serious story like STORM MOUNTAIN. Inspired by a food eating contest a young friend of mine named Adam got into a few years back, I took his real life experience and tweaked...

1/23/07 -- Worked today on my new novel, STORM MOUNTAIN. I'm only about a third of the way through the first draft, so my sense of character and place and events is still developing. As you may be able to guess from the title, the story involves m...