Loren Steffy

I’ve read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein several times, and on my bookshelf I have a copy lavishly illustrated by comic book artist Bernie Wrightson. The story has been told and retold and re-imagined. Indeed Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is one of my favorite films. But the Hollywood versions of the book tend to focus on “the monster” — bolts in the neck, bad haircut, arms extended, clumping…

My alma mater has been in the news a lot lately, and not in a good way. A botched hiring of a longtime journalist and former student to lead the revived journalism program resulted in the resignation of the university’s president. Last week, I wrote an essay for Texas Monthly on everything that had happened and tried to put some context around it. That piece led to a discussion with Tom Fox for…

The Athlit Ram on display in Israel’s National Maritime Museum in Haifa If you’re an Indiana Jones fan, you’re probably familiar with the plot structure for The Dial of Destiny, the latest installment in the film series. It follows the same pattern the previous films: Take a known archaeological artifact, give it mystical powers, and leave clues all over the world for Indy and his nemeses…

This post originally appeared on Stoney Creek Publishing’s Life in the Word Mines blog. No robots allowed Last fall, signing books at the Texas Book Festival, I sat next to Dick Reavis, long-time writer for the San Antonio Express-News and other publications. I asked him to sign a copy of  Texas Reporter, Texas Radical, a collection of his writings compiled by Michael Demson and published last…

A rendering of the completed Giant Magellan Telescope during daytime in Chile. The New York Times recently wrote about Chile’s “observatory alley,” an 800-mile stretch of the Atacama desert, a plateau high in the Andes whose clear night skies have been attracting astronomers for half a century. The story talks about some of the existing observatories in the region, and then mentions that its…

If you like some of the posts I’ve done here — admittedly rather sporadically — about writing and books, you might want to check out a new blog, Life in the Word Mines, at Stoney Creek Publishing. I’ll be contributing pieces about writing and publishing, and there will be interesting insights from others in the business about the process of writing, designing, publishing, and promoting…

Rediscovering a “lost” puffin story

In mid-December, my wife and I had an unexpected discussion about puffins. She was scrolling through Netflix or Hulu, and there was a special about the sea birds, and I declared my fascination with them, even though I’ve never seen on in the wild. She seemed surprised, and I explained it was because of a book my mother bought for me when I was seven. We were living in Cyprus, and we hadn’t…

‘Tanks’ for the memories

Like many people, I have fond childhood memories of VW vans, but I suspect mine are a little different than most. For about a year in the early 1970s, my family’s primary transportation was a shared, late-60s-model VW van known as the Penn Tank. The name referred to the University of Pennsylvania logo on each side. The University’s archaeology department had lent it to the Kyrenia Ship…

The promise and the podcast

The final episode of Putin’s Oil Heist, my 6-part limited series podcast, is now out. It’s been a great run. The series chronicles the demise of the Russian oil company Yukos, told through the eyes of its former chief financial officer, Bruce Misamore. Bruce relates his experiences fleeing Russia and fighting to save the company to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year. I had a lot of fun…

Father’s Day

My father and me, testing a Cub Scout rubber-band rocket in about 1975. Publisher’s Weekly just put out its list of the “10 Worst Dads in Books,” which seems like bad timing just before Father’s Day. While the article notes that “bad dads turn up less in fiction than bad moms,” the issue of bad fathers in books reminded me of some early discussions I had with publishers about The Man Who Thought…

Confronting the ‘psychological barrier’ of $5-a-gallon gasoline

Gasoline prices hit a new record this week, which sent legions of TV reporters scrambling to the nearest gas stations to interview motorists. Average prices for a gallon of regular unleaded rose to $4.96, up almost 60 cents a gallon in the past month and almost $2 from a year ago. The pumps are rife with tales of woe — anguished truckers, motorists in a state of disbelief at how much it’s now…

The Putin’s Oil Heist podcast

Soon after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, I found myself wondering what Bruce Misamore would make of it all. I was working on a blog post for the University of Houston about the impact of Western sanctions, and I knew that Bruce, having worked in Russia and having felt Vladimir Putin’s wrath, would have an interesting take. I hadn’t spoken to Bruce in years. I’d first met him when I did a…

The shock of Enron 20 years later

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Enron’s bankruptcy. I helped cover the company’s demise at Bloomberg News, and later, the various trials as a columnist for the Houston Chronicle. In the past two decades, books, films and musicals have all explored the impact of Enron, but 20 years removed from the company’s collapse what we tend to forget most often is the shock. Enron was the…

My novel, The Big Empty, is featured in a book blog tour put on by Lone Star Literary Life. One of the cool things they did was ask me for the first line of book, then created this spiffy graphic.  I worked really hard on that line, and it wasn’t how the book originally started. What’s now Chapter 2 was the original beginning for the book. In those early drafts, the first lines were: Trace…

In 2015, I was driving around a cattle ranch near Flatonia, in Central Texas, while working on a story for Texas Monthly. The owner’s son was giving me a tour of the place. As we pulled under a stand of oak trees to look at some of the herd, he asked me what it was like writing books. I described the nature of traditional publishing contracts: you devote your life to a project for a period of…

Rock to write by

Music plays a key role in my novel The Big Empty. The main character, Trace Malloy, isn’t a rock n’ roll fan, but a line from Bruce Springsteen’s The River, which he heard as a young man, sticks with him: “Is the dream a lie that don’t come true?” (When I first used that line, I thought it was “Is the dream alive that don’t come true.” Fortunately, I have an eagle-eyed editor.) In the second…

In defense of Trace Malloy

Earlier in the week, I posted an excerpt from The Big Empty. It was the opening to Chapter 2, in which Trace Malloy punches Blaine Witherspoon in the nose.  My wife read it, and she was genuinely upset.  “Why did you post that?” she asked. “It makes Malloy sound mean. It makes Witherspoon seem like the victim.” I was surprised by her reaction.  “You didn’t put in the part that explains why…