What makes a book special to you? What makes it stand out?
After years of book discussions with readers, I still find it interesting as to what elements a book has to have to give it a special place in someone’s library.
Jay, who writes a blog on this site, says he wants a [...]

Twitter anyone?
I’m just getting my feet wet…or my tweeter twitted, or something like that. If you log on to Twitter.com, and check out donbrunsbooks, you can see my daily two sentence blog about where I am, what I’m doing and random thoughts.
Who cares?
So far, without really reaching out, [...]

Most authors dislike the question ‘Where do you get your ideas?’. I mean, it’s like asking a person ‘where do you get your food?’. It’s all around you. At a restaurant, in a grocery store, on the vine, in the trees…
Authors get their ideas everywhere. Newspapers, on a plane, from a [...]

January 19, 1809, the father of the modern mystery was born in Boston. 200 years have passed, and still the accolades roll in. Edgar Allen Poe waxed poetically about the Raven, The Masque Of The Red Death, The Bells, The Telltale Heart, and The Murders In The Rue Morgue.
Yesterday I had the opportunity [...]

Barnes and Noble are suffering one of the worst years in their history. Borders is trying to sell. No one is buying. Books A Million is down 9% and one publisher has instructed its staff to buy NO MORE MANUSCRIPTS.
Why is business so bad? It’s bad everywhere. And most of it [...]

So I’m working on a book, and staring at the original portrait of a nude black woman with three faces. It’s a fascinating piece…by jazz aritist Miles Davis. And while I glance around the library with its rolling ladder,vaulted ceiling and wet bar, I see an original self portrait of Vicent [...]

I checked the markets yesterday using my computer. Then I hit refresh and watched them drop. Hit refresh and saw them jump back up. I could have done that all day. And Fox News has every change when it happens. They’re even faster than my computer.
I was in Florida last [...]

Everyone gets a tune in their head that they can’t get rid of. It happens to all of us. But why isn’t it a tune that we like. Or did we like it in the past and then, after it burned into our brain for a day, a week, a month, we [...]

Tony Hillerman walked into a discussion group down in New Mexico several years ago. There were about 12 of us in the room, and Tony took a seat in the back of the place. Our moderator, John Dunning, mentioned Tony and started telling a story about him. It seems that Tony’s first agent [...]

I cancelled my subscription to Men’s Health yesterday. I loved that magazine…funny, informative,brash, helpful tips…but yesterday they splashed Barack Obama’s portrait on the cover. I don’t need my escape magazine to push their agenda in my face.
This past weekend, Comedy Central’s John Stewart spoke before a group of Boston college students and opened [...]