April 3, 2024

My family and friends call them “Bruce Books,” in voices that are filled with love and despair and a desperate need to flee the room before I press copies in their hands. If they make the mistake of taking a book, they know I will turn up in a corner of their bedroom some night…

February 27, 2024

Let’s talk about writing a novel. Jim and I sat down to write Uncommon Scents three years ago. We thought we knew what that meant. We had a firm understanding that it would require a lot of words arranged sequentially. We knew words. We hoped that was enough. But then we remembered: punctuation! We stocked…

February 20, 2024

There are two secrets to becoming a bestselling author. (1) Be fiercely talented. (2) Release your first book no later than about 1990. Today? The odds are roughly zero that you will sell a lot of books if you’re working on your first book now. They’re not exactly zero. That’s an exaggeration. They’re just so…

January 30, 2024

At the end of Uncommon Scents, an unruly mob of conspiracy believers gathers in Boyd Park, a lovely city park near downtown San Rafael. We wrote a scene filled with the creativity and diversity that people might bring to the world if augmented reality becomes widely available. Our scene is packed with in-jokes, references to…