Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

Ischia is Burning book cover, topographic map design with crimson title and CLASSIFIED stamp

Continue reading → Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Tony Kushner Head Fakes History with Lincoln Screenplay

Tony Kushner is a well-known playwright, and his latest success was found in writing the screenplay for the movie — Lincoln — starring Daniel Day-Lewis.  With each chit comes a chipping, and Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney is rightly angry that Kushner intentionally changed history to add fake drama to the movie by deciding to invent two members of the Connecticut congressional delegation who voted against the 13th Amendment to the Constitution to end slavery.  In actuality, all four members of the Connecticut representatives voted for ending slavery.  Why would Kushner so deliberately skew what really happened?

Continue reading → Tony Kushner Head Fakes History with Lincoln Screenplay

Final Draft 8 Review

If you’re a professional screenwriter, there is one and only one, software package you need to help you find success in the marketplace:  Final Draft

Continue reading → Final Draft 8 Review