In the meantime, take a moment to check out all the great Q&A interviews here on the site. Fun conversations with creatives like Laura Lippman, Dennis Lehane, Reed Farrel Coleman, Megan Abbott, George Pelecanos, Brad Meltzer, Duane Swierczynski, Dennis Tafoya, Kristen Ellis-Henderson, and many others!

Dennis Lehane's terrific story, THE DROP, arrives in bookstores and movie theaters this week. Pick up the novel (based on Dennis's short story, "Animal Rescue") and go check out the motion picture, starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, and James Galdolfini (in his final role). Dennis wrote the screenplay, which details "a robbery gone awry and an investigation that digs deep into the neighborhood's past where friends, families, and foes all work together to make a living -- no matter the cost." I loved the original short story and was lucky enough to get my hands on a preview copy of the novel. I'll be first in line this weekend to see the film. Great stuff as always from the master, Dennis Lehane. 

With all this activity this week for Lehane fans, it seems like the perfect time to revisit the Q&A Dennis did with me a while back. He talks about fiction and the creative life, and gives some words of wisdom that hang over my own writing desk (because I chickened out on getting them as a tattoo). Go here to read the Q&A. And get in on THE DROP this week!

I first met Ron Giles some twenty-five years ago, when our corporate career paths crossed at QVC, a then-fledgling shopping channel/electronic retailer. Part of the founding class of QVC, Ron was an entrepreneurial television veteran, whose many innovations are still used today by programs selling products on TV. Working with Ron during those years, I always appreciated his leadership, gentlemanly demeanor, and creativity. He was a kindred spirit. 

After he retired from television, Ron turned his attention to a new frontier: writing for print. His first effort, On Harrisonville Avenue, was an amusing memoir about his own youth in a mill town on the Ohio River. His first novel, Cottonwood Pass, delved into the world of suspense and global politics with a story set in Colorado. I particularly enjoyed the imagination behind his third book, Great Heats, historic fiction set 1,000 years ago among the mounds and earthworks of what is now Southern Ohio. 

Ron's most recent novel, Locusts and Wild Honey, is a captivating novel of interwoven short stories, featuring a ghost, a witch, and a curse that follows generations of the Porter family. Something wicked this way comes and Ron handles it all with skill and insight.

Finally, I'm thrilled to learn that Ron's short story, "The Friday Night Dance," will be included in Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio. Edited by Neil Carpathios, this anthology of poetry and stories features the work of forty Ohio writers, including Donald Ray Pollock. Watch for it in January 2015. (Another Ron Giles short story, "The Prey," is featured in Chester County Fiction, the well-received anthology from Oermead Press.)

A teacher and historian. A television veteran and interactive-TV pioneer. A singer and member of The Hymn Society. A writer. Ron Giles brings his talents and interests to his fiction. And I'm so glad he took the time to visit the blog today with this fascinating Q&A about the creative life.

Hi Ron, thanks for being here. Tell us: when did you know you wanted to be a writer?
The decision to try writing a book came to me late in life—in 2007. Retirement had been forced on me in 2001 with the 9/11 attacks. After that tragedy, corporations retrenched and became conservative with their spending, not using Television Consultants as they once had. With no work on the horizon, my wife and I began traveling in the US, and while in Northern California, I picked up a John Steinbeck novella, Cannery Row, at the Monterrey Airport. Steinbeck’s writing had spoken to me as a college student and years later, I fell gladly and comfortably back into his characterizations, descriptions, and dialogue woven around a good story.

While reading Cannery Row, at age 65, I decided to try my hand at writing a book.

I make the book distinction because during my 35-year television career, I had written many intros/outros, commercials and public service announcements—short form, compact communications—and with our church program, "Hymns and Their Stories"—I was writing three-minute histories of a hymn’s creation—but I had never, on my own, set out to write something with characters and a plot that takes place over days, weeks, or years. I brushed up on the principles of writing and took a Great Courses study from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, sat down and began. The book was to be a murder mystery, set in my hometown during the 1950s. The planning, flexibility, and fluidity necessary to manage writing such a plot quickly revealed itself and I threw that idea away and settled instead on writing a memoir set in 1955 when I was thirteen.

Who or what inspired you as a kid or teenager? 
I found the life of Christ an engrossing and inspiring story then and still do today. The rapid move from being acclaimed as the Messiah to being executed in a horrible way was tragic. Yet the grace with which Christ faced the inevitable was stirring and admirable. I still marvel at it.

As a twelve year old, when I began reading literature, I started with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I was reading it over an RC Cola at the local restaurant hangout, when a town character, Doug, approached me and asked if I had read any American authors. After thinking about it, and answering negatively, he led me outside to his car, a 1948 Hudson, in which some people believed he lived, sleeping on the front seat, because the back seat was taken with his “library” as he called it – hundreds of books, organized in some way that only he understood, with cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other, bulging with paperbacks and hard covers . He reached a long arm in and pulled out a hardback edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. “Read this,” he commanded. “It will change your life.” I finished the Hardy novel and then read Twain. The clash of the Victorian style with Twain’s vernacular and profane style was glorious, and, Doug was right—the racial and social attitudes confronted by Huck rattled the teenage world I was sure that I understood, until then.

What creative work most recently inspired you?
I recently finished Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson—a 130-page exploration of the conflict between science and religion. A novelist with a Pulitzer Prize and a Hemingway Award, she shines her considerable intellect and vocabulary on the place of “mind” in a biological being.

In moments of self-doubt, how do you push through?
Doubt about the path that I have started down, or having written myself into a corner, or not having any words come to me are all things that happen to me. To get out of this, I force myself to write, even though my instinct is to keep my hands away from a keyboard. I might (probably will) throw away what I write during this time, but the act of writing focuses me on what I should be doing, even though the words might be wrong or I spend too many words “telling” the story rather than using dialog to advance the plot.

Have you ever abandoned a creative project?
I have a “whodunit” puzzler synopsis that I set down on two or three pages of paper and then stopped because I had not completely graphed out the twists and turns of the plot; I have never rekindled the desire to return and pick it back up. It involved the discovery of four Homo sapiens skeletons in a lava tube located among the Deccan Traps of India and the suspicious deaths of each explorer on the team who made the discovery. Hmmmm.

Which of your works comes closest to the way you heard/saw it in your head?
My third book, Great Heats, was pretty much how I envisioned it. I had grown up in an area of Ohio where the Adena/Hopewell people from the pre-historic period of this continent left evidence of their life and their art. In my hometown today is a horseshoe-shaped mound that they built 2000 years ago. The rims of the Horseshoe Mound are eight feet high and it is 75 feet long at the “U.” In all the years while growing up that I saw the mounds and their ceremonial pipes, I only saw objects. But one day in 2008, while visiting the Hopewell National Park (it used to be called “Mound City”) in Chillicothe, Ohio, I asked myself about the lives of the people that built the mounds and fashioned the ceremonial objects —their triumphs, their joys, their adversities. It wasn’t long afterwards that an outline emerged.

What was the best creative advice you ever received?

Very honored that POETS & WRITERS magazine introduced their new "The Savvy Self-Publisher" column with a five-page spread on "Robb Cadigan's PHOENIXVILLE RISING." In the interview, I share my journey as a writer and self-publisher and receive some valuable criticism and advice from two publishing-industry professionals. I hope my experiences with my debut novel are helpful to fellow writers. 

"The narrative is quite polished and the characters are strongly realized ... all in all, the book itself is a great example of the viability of producing a high-quality product through self-publishing." - Paul Dinas, independent editor

Here's a sneak peek of the article. My thanks to Debra Englander, freelance editor and writer, who created "The Savvy Self-Publisher" for POETS & WRITERS. Look for it on newsstands now!

Hey, Dennis, thanks for being here. Tell us, when did you know you wanted to be a writer? When did you know you were one?
I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I started writing horror and science fiction inspired by movies and TV shows and the short stories I loved when I first started reading, by guys like Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch. There were a lot of monsters, a lot of dinosaurs lurking in remote canyons in the desert. Demons that passed through portals or holes from other dimensions. When you’re a certain kind of kid there’s a lot of cataclysmic stuff in your head trying to get out.

I don’t think I accepted that I was a real writer until I was walking from Penn Station to the Flatiron Building to meet my editor for the first time. Before I had an agent and contract I think writing was something I didn’t let myself consider a serious aspiration. It was a desire I kept hidden for all the reasons we hide things that really matter to us – fear of failure, fear of ridicule for wanting something that seems beyond the normal possibilities of a life defined by work and family and a high school diploma.

What creative work most recently inspired you?
I’m constantly looking for cool stuff to light up the creative parts of my brain. I love poetry and will sit and read the Writer’s Almanac for hours for the daily poems. There’s a poem that I stumbled on in an issue of Poetry by Mary Szybist that I can’t stop thinking about called “On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes.” I think it’s about the irreducibility of some experiences, like the death in the title. The narrator asks the girl what the eyes taste like, and she says, ‘they taste like eyes.’ Some things aren’t like other things. Death isn’t like anything else. If I knew Mary I’d love to ask her. But even if I’m getting the poem wrong, it’s beautiful and dreamlike and startling, which describes all the stuff I really love and (most importantly) that I can feel myself learning from as I read. From Annie Proulx’s Western stories to Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything or Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. It’s not just that I love those stories, it’s that their dreamlike quality almost overwhelms the narrative in the way that our obsessive thoughts, our endless attempt to understand our experiences can overwhelm our daily lives and obscure reality.

Have you ever abandoned a creative project?
I start and abandon work constantly, but I don’t think much actually goes to waste. If I’ve come up with anything good I’ll most likely reuse it somewhere else. Also, it can be tough to sort out abandoning from writing…really…slowly, which I also do. If when I die there are a hundred unfinished stories on my hard drive, it might be that I really did intend to go back and finish them. I need a really good idea to write the next thing in a story, and I force myself to work almost exclusively in a linear fashion; I’m not allowed to jump around in a story because I know from experience that I’ll end up with a bunch of scenes that don’t mean anything because they lack connective tissue. A sack of bones instead of a living, breathing thing.

The last film I enjoyed was …
Loved Blue Ruin  by Jeremy Saulnier. It’s about violence and retribution, but without any of the self-righteousness or schmaltz of pictures that are usually about those things. The main character is avenging a wrong, but he has no idea what he’s doing, either in the particulars of attacking a violent felon or when trying to concoct a strategy to keep his family safe. The result is certainly horrifying, but also affecting because you can’t help but feel for this mentally-fragile guy who’s so completely out of his depth. Also really intrigued by The Rover and Under the Skin, both of which I think are more about evocative situations and imagery than compelling narrative.

What creative work might we be surprised to find on your shelf, iPod, or TiVo?
I read a lot of true crime, which I guess wouldn’t be surprising, but I also read a lot of military history and have a lot of old books about UFO conspiracies and ‘strange but true’ stuff from the fifties and sixties (including a few great old paperbacks given to me by Wallace Stroby) I have the collected books of Charles Fort and a copy of They Knew Too Much About UFOs by the huckster Gray Barker.  I recently tore through The United States of Paranoia, by Jesse Walker, which is a terrifically smart survey of American conspiracy theories going back to the Revolution. There’s a point in the sixties where all these threads of conspiracy-obsession, UFO-obsession and Illuminati-obsession get so tangled that folks like the Discordianists - who consciously promoted conspiracy myths as a kind of cultural performance art - began to believe themselves part of an actual disinformation conspiracy, and leftwing tricksters concocted a spoof of a RAND Corporation analysis that became a staple of rightwing conspiracy mongers who thought the document was real. I’d like to use all of this stuff in a book someday, but I think I’d need help from someone much brighter than I am. Maybe one of my kids will help me sort it all out.  

Facebook and Twitter: friend or foe to a creative?
I think using social media is another endeavor that requires the help of smart friends. I really admire people who do it well (the brilliant Megan Abbott comes immediately to mind), but the lure of fascinating nonsense on the web can be a little like alcohol: When does a bracing shot of brandy to steady the nerves become a three-day, Lost Weekend bender? Anyone who’s gone online to check their mail and found themselves hours later looking at pictures of freakishly huge sand crabs or a fox that adopted a pit bull will know what I mean.

The internet is absolutely essential to what I do. I’m way too shy to approach people and get information I need to write, as a rule, so I make tremendous use of online forums, wikis and other sites maintained by people with a passion for esoteric bits of data. And social media as a promotion tool clearly works, when applied correctly and diligently. My friend Don Lafferty is a fantastic resource in this area, and I always feel guilty that I don’t follow his advice more than I do. I think the trick is to get to the useful stuff and get back to work, and I haven’t mastered that yet. So, as with many things, I guess I’d say watch the folks who are doing it right and take some lessons.

In addition to writing, how do you express your creativity?
I love to take photographs. I’m not very good at it, but it’s a lot of fun.

Brad, thanks so much for being here. Let’s start with this:  What creative work most recently inspired you?
I’ve been using the summer to show my younger and older sons some true film classics. THE IRON GIANT and THE TRUMAN SHOW still do it to me.

The most underrated creative (writer, musician, artist)  …
Storyboard artists in film. They’re directing it with lead pencils and getting no credit at all. Viva la storyboard artist! 

Which of your works comes closest to the way you heard/saw it in your head?
THE FIRST COUNSEL. It’s the only opening I ever wrote that I didn’t rewrite by the time I got to the end. It’s word for word the same.

What was the best creative advice you ever received?
"If it was easy, everyone would do it."

What creative work might we be surprised to find on your shelf, iPod, or DVR?
No one loves ANIMAL HOUSE like I love the film ANIMAL HOUSE. On my iPod, I’ve got a sudden love for the soundtrack of A STAR IS BORN, since it reminds me of my mother.

In addition to writing, how do you express your creativity?
Little notes for my kids. Tiny emails and texts and post-its. I will take them everywhere.

The most difficult thing about the life of a creative is …
That day where you’re convinced you don’t know what you’re doing. Those days come all the time. To me, if it all always goes perfectly for me, I’ll know I’m done.

Works that simultaneously made you want to write and to quit writing:
REPLAY by Ken Grimwood. THE ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY [Robb's note: this is my top candidate for a Great American Novel]. THE FAULT IN OUR STARS. The play AVENUE Q. Any great comic book art. FOX IN SOCKS by Dr. Seuss. Watching any documentary about Jim Henson or Mr. Rogers.

Big fun at the Mystery Writers of America University this past Saturday in Philadelphia. An excellent series of classes/lectures by top-notch instructors, held in the beautiful and historic Society Hill section of Philadelphia.

Every one of the speakers, successful authors all, was engaging and inspiring. (I will say, I think the MWA should make an effort to include instructors from the host city -- there are plenty of excellent crime/mystery writers right here in the City of Brotherly Love.)

Special thanks to the instructors, every one of whom took the time to greet attendees individually and talk to us about our works-in-progress. A generous crew, full of wisdom.

The authors/instructors and their courses:

JESS LOUREY: "After the Idea"
HALLIE EPHRON: "Dramatic Structure & Plot
DANIEL STASHOWER: "Setting and Description"
REED FARREL COLEMAN: "Character"
KATHLEEN GEORGE: "Writing as Re-writing"
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: "The Writing Life"

If you get a chance to attend an MWA-University event like this in your area, seize the moment. There's nothing like hanging out with a bunch of murderers and investigators for a day. 

A bittersweet time for mystery fans everywhere as crime writer Reed Farrel Coleman has released the final Moe Prager novel, THE HOLLOW GIRL -- available NOW at your favorite indie bookstore or here.

Dennis Lehane says: "In Reed Farrel Coleman's hands, the Moe Prager novels are turning into one of the great series in PI literature. These are soulful, beautifully written investigations into an American Dream that slipped through our fingers when no one was looking."

Reed was gracious enough to visit this blog a few months ago for a free-wheeling Q&A about the writing life. You can find that conversation at this link. 

Grab the last Moe now -- and be sure to watch for more Reed Farrel Coleman in September as he takes over Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone with BLIND SPOT!

PS: I'm looking forward to this Saturday when Reed and other members of the Mystery Writers of America will be leading a day of top-notch classes for fellow mystery/crime writers. Can't wait!

Hi Megan. Thanks so much for being here. Let's start off with this: when did you know you wanted to be a writer? When did you know you were one?
I’ve always written and even more so, I’ve always been a compulsive reader (and I love reading best), but I never had a distinct moment when I just knew. Maybe it’s yet to come!

Who or what inspired you as a kid or teenager?
Books (classics, pulp, true-crime, Southern Gothic, you name it) and old Hollywood movies (gangster movies, screwball comedies, melodramas). And my parents, both writers and both endlessly curious people.  Also: Archie comic books.

What creative work most recently inspired you?
The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers.

The most underrated creative (writer, musician, artist) is …
I’ll go with Woodrell again. He’s very highly rated but should be rated a thousand times more.  Same with Jack Pendarvis, brilliant short-story writer, novelist, TV writer (Adventure Time), essayist.

In moments of self doubt, how do you push through?
Mostly, I don’t know what else to do. So I keep going. That, and the occasional cocktail.

Have you ever abandoned a creative project?
Countless. You can’t know until you’re in it. And sometimes you lose your way. I started my novel The End of Everything when I was twenty-three, abandoned it, and picked it up more than ten years later and finished it.

Which of your works comes closest to the way you heard/saw it in your head?
They always change, they really do. That’s part of the mystery and excitement of the process.

What was the best creative advice you ever received?
From the wonderful writer Wallace Stroby, quoting Harry Dean Stanton: “Whatever you do … is right.”

My favorite fictional character or hero is …
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

The next book on my reading pile is …
An advance copy of Sophie Littlefield’s The Missing Place. It looks great.

The book I really should have read by now is …
So many! Let’s go with Crime and Punishment.

Does The Great American Novel exist (yet)? If so, what is it?
There’s been so many of them: Gatsby, Beloved, American Pastoral, Invisible Man. There couldn’t be just one. America is a complicated place.

What creative work might we be surprised to find on your shelf, iPod, or TiVo?
On my DVR I have many, many episodes of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Facebook and Twitter: friend or foe to a creative?
Both.

In addition to writing, how do you express your creativity?
I’m a compulsive Instagrammer. I love taking pictures of strange and beautiful things.

The most difficult thing about the life of a creative is …
Isolation required.

For such a nice person, you seem drawn to some truly dark tales. What are some true-crime stories you find fascinating?
All of them. Many of my books are based on real-life crimes. There’s several cases that linger with me the most: Black Dahlia, Zodiac, Jeffrey MacDonald (the case immortalized in Fatal Vision). Recently, the Amanda Knox and Casey Anthony cases. But mostly it’s seeing these tales rendered in expert writerly hands, like Robert Kolker’s superior non-fiction book last year, Lost Girls.

I've had a blast visiting book clubs over the past few months. Such a thrill to meet readers who really seem to enjoy my debut novel, PHOENIXVILLE RISING.

Recently, I visited the wonderful store-wide book club at Towne Book Center and Cafe in Collegeville, PA, a huge supporter of PHOENIXVILLE RISING. (In fact, my novel is the bestselling regional novel in Towne's 27-year history!) We had a lively, insightful discussion of the novel, with a packed house for the book club. It's always a good thing for the writer when the store has to bring out extra chairs to accommodate the crowd!

Visit your local independent bookstore. And if you're ever near Collegeville, be sure to stop by Towne Book Center, one of the country's true indie gems. Tell them I sent you -- and let them introduce you to all the terrific books they love. Pam, Mary, Jen, Masynn, Sue, Liz and all my friends at Towne are even more accurate than an algorithm.