I visited the Morgan Library and Museum in NYC a few weeks ago where I saw the Charles Dickens at 200 exhibit. Among the displays were pages from Dickens’ manuscript of Our Mutual Friend, handwritten with pen and ink, in small, crowded cursive. Words, sentences and paragraphs had lines drawn through them. New text was [...]

I have been writing  the script for a graphic novel. To my surprise, the script is about one and a half times longer than the manuscript for a prose novel. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Essentially, the script describes each graphic novel page. In my mind—or more often, on paper—I have created a series of [...]

One of the main characters in the novel I’m working on is an avid teen hunter. The story is set in Vermont. So, I need to know about hunting. In Vermont. Even though I graduated from high school in VT, what I know isn’t worth much: -Our goats were in danger of being mistaken for [...]

Just last week, my second book, Blue Chicken, was published. I’m excited, to be sure, but I finished the art for this book over nine months ago, and quickly moved on to writing another. Since four long years passed between my first book, Scribble, and this one, I now find myself in a situation that [...]

by M. W. Penn Last evening we had a dinner party for eight and this evening close friends are coming over to help clear away the leftovers. We often perform this service for each other – falls into the ‘tough job but someone has to do it’ category. Today there is a plethora of fresh [...]