John A. Heldt

I barely remember the first time I read Of Mice and Men . It was one of those classics I read in school because I had to. As a teen in the 1...

Near the end of The Nightingale , a novel by Kristin Hannah , the protagonist, an old woman, makes an observation in 1995. Looking back at h...

I didn’t quite match the frenetic pace of some in the NaNoWriMo crowd. It took me five weeks to write fifty thousand words and eight to wri...

There are days I think Nora Roberts isn’t real. No one, I am convinced, could write 214 books, including 195 New York Times bestsellers, e...

I like the Christmas season. I like the music, the lights, the festive spirit, and, of course, the holiday itself. No other time of the year...

As a reader, I am not easily impressed. I have read more than 500 books and wouldn’t consider more than 30 great works of literature. Every ...

If there is one American holiday that never seems to get its due, it is Veterans Day. Lost in the maze between Halloween and Christmas, it i...

If there was one event that dictated the primary setting of Mercer Street , released last week, it was a radio broadcast that was supposed t...

I admit I resisted writing this book. Even as one who had written six novels set in the twentieth century, I resisted writing about the 1930...

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Back to the Future Part II . Maybe twenty years, in fact. But today, the movie is fresh in my mind, if not...

Of the six time-travel novels I have published in three and a half years, The Journey is perhaps the least like the rest. It is easily my s...

I never tire of reading Nelson DeMille . There is no one in the business who combines suspense and humor as well as the New York novelist, w...

As a sports fan, I generally root for the underdog. If my favorite team is not playing in a game or in the hunt for a playoff spot, I side w...

One of the first things I learned as a self-published author three years ago was that I was more than an author. I was a businessman who had...

As I noted in a review of Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn more than two years ago, I don’t read many non-fiction books. And, when I do, I tend ...

When you write historical fiction, you are immediately confronted with at least two challenges. The first is to describe a time. The second ...

I admit I’m not very good at keeping track of these things. Had I not seen an obscure Internet reference yesterday, I would have never known...

Of all the rules Stephen King has laid down for writers, none gets my attention like this one: "You have three months." That’...

Oxford defines writer’s block as "the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing." It ...

There was a time when I went through James Patterson novels like some people go through newspapers. In a stretch of five years, I read thir...

I have sought its assistance when writing every book. When preparing The Mine and The Mirror , I asked it for information on the peacetim...

To say that Ken Follett is one of my favorite authors is a serious understatement. I have read eighteen of his novels, including four of hi...

E.L. Doctorow once said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whol...

A few years ago, before I began writing novels of my own, I used to jump on every thriller that hit the bestsellers list. Vince Flynn became...

Of all the bloggers I've worked with in the past three years, few have been more helpful than Joyce Lamb. The curator of USA TODAY’s Hap...

Author Sally Koslow once compared writing a book to "giving birth to an elephant." Even as a father who has seen the inside of ...