Dear Friends, REDEMPTION. The dictionary defines it as “atonement for guilt; deliverance from sin.”  That somehow seems an appropriate way to describe Jesse Bradford’s challenge in STRONGER THAN SIN. Can Jesse redeem himself for his past actions?  Is love powerful enough motivation for Jesse to become a better man? In STRONGER THAN SIN, Jesse’s sinful ways came about as a result of his losing his way to the cult of celebrity after becoming a superstar football player.  Sadly, this is something with which we can all identify since it seems that all too often we hear a news report about a professional athlete who has gotten in trouble. Despite his faults, however, Jesse is a man capable of great love who just needs to find the hero within him once more. From the moment that Mick’s sister, Dr. Liliana Carrera, walked onto the scene in SINS OF THE FLESH, I knew she had to get her own story. I fell in love with her caring, loyalty to her brother and her inner strength. There was no doubt in my mind that any story where she was the heroine would be emotionally compelling and filled with passion.  And there was no…

The bookshelves at your local brick-and-mortar bookstores are teeming with how-to-write manuals. For the young fiction writer, there are classics such as E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, plus whole series devoted to specific prose concerns like plot construction and character development. For the budding playwright, notable must-haves include Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing, with its dialectic approach, and Jeffrey Hatcher’s The Art and Craft of Playwriting, with its more Aristotelian approach. For the up-and-coming screenwriter, some selections would have to be Syd Field’s nuts-and-bolts Screenplay and Christopher Vogel’s hugely influential The Writer’s Journey. But what’s a person to do if they’re like me, suffer creative attention deficit disorder, and want to excel in fiction, theatre, and film? Surely there have to be some tools which apply to all three. And so over the years, I’ve distilled a list of ten hard-and-fast principles which can apply to all forms of contemporary storytelling, regardless of genre or medium. Now none of these principles, these commandments, are original to me. They have been collected and culled over years spent reading and studying craft, usually while curled up on a soft warm surface and/or…