Get a sneak peek into the mind of the author. Rabbi Mark L. Shook takes you behind the scenes of his research, writing process, and more in his blog.
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Earthly Thoughts be Silent Now
As a means of relaxation and stress reduction, I find that reading the work of Bart Ehrman is just the ticket. Ehrman is a prolific scholar of Christianity and Christian Literature. In one of his early books, he describes the way most non-fundamentalist Christian seminaries approach the text of the New Testament. They study it
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Historical fiction has lots of unwritten rules.
Historical fiction has lots of unwritten rules. One of these unwritten rules pertains to language. If you are writing about ancient Babylonia, the names of people and places should sound Babylonian. Better yet, they should be in Babylonian, or whatever language Babylonians spoke, at the time of the story. Names should be transliterated into an
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Once I had an end, I found a better beginning.
I vividly recall how relieved I was to have the first draft completed. I reviewed it one more time and decided to add a bit more detail to the first chapter. Discovery Under Fire was supposed to open with a firefight between members of the Iraqi National Police Force and Sadaam’s Hussein’s diehard military remnants. Media reports
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I Never Intended to Write a Novel
I never intended to write a novel. Teaching classes on the TANACH/the Hebrew Scriptures was a passion I could indulge in as a congregational rabbi and as an adjunct professor of Jewish philosophy at St. Louis University. But it was the heartfelt questions of my students in both communities that propelled me down the path of
All Shook Up 