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  Blog July 2025 The Writing Mood Music has always been a key part of my life, especially when I write. I've heard that writers retreat to quiet, isolated spaces to work without interruptions. Not me. Over the years, my taste in music has shifted from U2, the Beatles, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains to Mozart, Brahms, Prokofiev, and Bruckner. As time races away, I’ve reflected on my younger years and found myself drawn to the great outdoors and different tastes in music. I’ve always been what some have called outdoorsy. And that is true: from mountain climbing, swimming in the ocean, golfing, hunting and fishing. Now, I maintain a hunting lease on a couple of thousand acres of land off the Caprock in Graza County, Texas. It is a great escape, especially at sunset. My wife and I enjoy sitting on the tailgate of our truck, sipping a cold drink, and not saying a word. The sounds of the vast open spaces are more than enough to soothe us into a peaceful, relaxing, and creative mood...
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Trust but Verity

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  Trust but Verify Blog May 2025   Summertime, and the living is easy…, so says Ella Fitzgerald. With one glance around, I agree with her. My summertime is a smooth ride: kids and grandkids are flying high; school is winding down; our eldest, Emily, is home from a semester in Rome; Gwen and I are enjoying the fruits of our labors of over fifty years of policing for me, and teaching for Gwen. These years have been the cherry on top of the dessert. It is the pleasure we enjoy with our little road trips to the small towns of West Texas and throughout the USA and Israel. Our book signing ventures have ranged from the steps of the LBJ Library in Austin to the historical plaza at the San Albino Cathedral in Mesilla, New Mexico; to the vast open agricultural fields of Dimmitt, Texas, on to the bookstores of Canyon and Plainview; and eastward to the canyons of New York City and the NYPD First Precinct, the home of the World Trade Center. And last, but certainly not least, to T...
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  Blog March 2025 It Is Not The Ides of March Historians tell us that “The Ides of March” is generally accepted to be March 15th, the Roman calendar day on which Julius Caesar was stabbed to death. My “Ides of March” did not exactly fall on the 15th. However, by that date, I was resigned to the cold, hard facts of the Los Angeles fires. Specifically, the Palisades Fire struck me like a bolt of lightning.  My movie endeavors began at a private party on Mulholland Drive, at a home later to be decimated by the fire. That house, and hundreds of others, put the movie production business in a tailspin. The recovery has been slow but steady. “Color of the Prism” is now moving forward with a target date moved back to late 2025.  Nevertheless, a recent trip to Tucson offered an opportunity to visit many of the actual sites from my experiences that have been fictionalized in my books, and soon, the movies, “Color of the Prism” and “The Russian: The Roadhouse where the assassins par...
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