What with the July 4 holiday and various deadlines in my life, it’s been a whole week since I blogged. I’ve got my critique group tonight, so I’ll need to be brief today.

My question for today: What are you reading this week? (You can cheat and say what you read last week, if you want.)

I’ll start. Last week I read Tosca Lee’s forthcoming novel HAVAH for endorsement. If I could write as well as Tosca, I’d consider myself a writer. HAVAH will be out in October. It’s a novel about Eve (as in Adam and Eve). I had thought there was not much to say about that story. I was wrong. One thing I like about Tosca is that she makes me think about things in a whole new way. Tosca tells me she’s not good at math, but she is (despite that tragic flaw) brilliant. If you read her first novel DEMON, you know what I mean.

I also read THE GOOD GUY, by Dean Koontz, which is about a “regular guy” in a bar who meets a stranger who mistakes him for a hired assassin and gives him $10000 and the photo of a woman to murder. Of course, this regular guy has to poke his nose into this business and try to save the woman. A good, fast yarn, very much the kind I like to read. Here’s a link on Amazon.

I was on quite a roll last week, and I also reread BLOOD BROTHERS, by Rick Acker. I had read it several months ago for endorsement, and got an autographed copy in the mail from Rick last week. I don’t normally reread books, but I did this one. I enjoyed it even more the second time than the first. This is a legal thriller about two feuding brothers who own a pharmaceutical company and are fighting it out for a new billion-dollar drug, so there’s a nice science backdrop and some good fight scenes PLUS really authentic legal manuevering in the courtroom (Rick is a lawyer in the Bay Area). To be honest, I liked this novel better than the Koontz novel. That takes nothing away from Dean, of course. It’s just that Rick’s book is EXACTLY the kind of book I like to read. And it was very well done. BLOOD BROTHERS is just off the presses and is available on Amazon now.

I’m also rereading Book #6 in the Harry Potter series. I’ve been reading the whole series aloud to my kids for the last several months. They’re of course way too old to be read to, but it’s a family tradition that goes back almost 20 years, and we all really enjoy it, so we’ve kept it up a lot longer than you are “supposed to.” My kids don’t much like Book #6 for some reason, although I do. They like Book #5, which was not such a favorite of mine. But hey, they’re all pretty darned good, and I’ll no doubt end up reading the whole series another 10 times.

What are you reading this week? Got any recommendations for some GREAT fiction?

I’m going to interrupt our current series of blogs on One-Sentence Summaries of novels, to make a quick announcement. Tomorrow, we’ll get back to business.

Ahem, my announcement: I have recently had yet another work of art published. This one is not a book, it’s an article.

A little backstory first. As many of my loyal blog readers know, I’ve been a part of the evolving story of the alleged Jesus family tomb since it was announced about a year ago with much fanfare. Like most everyone else on the planet, I am skeptical that this tomb ever housed the mortal remains of Jesus of Nazareth. Of course, it’s possible. The question is — what are the odds?

Being a theoretical physicist and a troublemaker with far too much time on my hands, I have written some articles over the past year that got me quite a bit of notice. In fact, back in late October of last year, a statistics peer-reviewed journal, The Annals of Applied Statistics, asked me to be a referee for the forthcoming paper by Prof. Andrey Feuerverger, the statistician who was hired to analyze the alleged Jesus family tomb.

So I spent a considerable part of November and December reviewing Dr. Feuerverger’s article and writing a response article. I also took the opportunity to do some new calculations to improve on my previous work. One rather unusual issue was that Dr. Feuerverger requested that his paper NOT be circulated prior to publication. (Normally, academics are only too happy to get preprints out as far and as fast as possible.) So I honored that request, and in fact have not really made any public comments on the tomb controversy.

But now Dr. Feuerverger’s article has been published, along with comments by eight referees, including mine. I have posted a new article on my web site that summarizes all the new info (many, many pages in the journal, not to mention a 29 page supplementary article that the journal asked me to include on their web site that details my latest calculations).

You can read all about it in my article: Analysis of Andrey Feuerverger’s Article on the Jesus Family Tomb. I know not all of you will be interested in this, nor will all of you even understand why I’ve put so many hours of my time into this apparently absurd project. The answer is that it was just something I wanted to do, and I didn’t think anyone else would do it quite the way I wanted. So I did it.

Tomorrow, we’ll continue on with our study of those pesky One-Sentence Summaries. See ya then!

I just returned yesterday from six days at a writing conference. It was great, wonderful, and exhausting. I taught a mentoring track with 10 writers in which we spent 8 hours together doing very extended critiques. I also had about 20 appointments with writers to critique their work.

All of that was fun, but I still think the best times were the offline hours when I sat down with old friends (and new friends) to talk. I think there are no friends like writer friends.

On the airplane coming home, I sat with one of my loyal blog readers who often posts here, Camille Eide, who lives not too far from me. She’s only been writing for about a year, so she had set her expectations relatively low–at the level of an early “Sophomore.” However, after getting strongly encouraging feedback from a couple of novelists at the conference, Camille worked up her courage to show her sample chapter to a couple of editors. They liked it too.

Camille told me all this in the airport while we waited for our flight. I asked to see her work and she let me read it on the plane. I liked it! I liked it a lot. I don’t know how the large-scale structure of the story will work out, but the 20 pages I read were Xtremely good on every point that I know how to measure. So I told her it’s time for her to get an agent. For the rest of the flight, I took a nap.

I took today off from doing any kind of serious work, since my brain is still basically oatmeal. I’ve been reading a legal thriller today by Rick Acker, who I met at the conference. I already knew about him because I’d read his second novel for endorsement a couple of months ago at the request of his publicist. I liked that one so much that I wanted to read his debut novel, DEAD MAN’S RULE which came out last May. Since Rick was at the conference, I bought a copy and got it autographed.

I’ll tell you, I REALLY like this book. Rick is a lawyer and has done great research on Russian biological weapons, and he’s got a great, compelling story. DEAD MAN’S RULE feels like a nice blend of the best early work by John Grisham and Tom Clancy. Suspense has always been my favorite genre, and Rick’s book is a terrific suspense novel. I hope to finish it tomorrow, because I really do need to get back to work.

Tomorrow, we’ll pick up on Cindy Martinusen Coloma’s “Puzzle Method” and I’ll report on how I liked the ending of DEAD MAN’S RULE. See ya then!