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Hello. I'm Tom Bentley, and I've run a writing and editing business out of my house for many years. I've published hundreds of nonfiction freelance pieces, and self-published my coming-of-age novel, "All Roads Are Circles," a few years back, as well as had a small press publish my story collection, "Flowering and Other Stories."
My novel "Aftershock" is based on the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, and was published in mid-2018. My newest novel, "Swirled All the Way to the Shrub," is a collaborative work set in Prohibition-era Boston. It was released at the tail end of 2018.
My short nonfiction pieces include first-person essays, travel pieces and more journalistic articles; venues include Forbes, Writer's Digest, Wine Enthusiast, The American Scholar, Writer's Market, the Los Angeles Times and many more. I've won three Traveler's Tales Solas Awards.
I was the 1999 winner of the National Steinbeck Center's short story contest, and that story is included in my collection, Flowering and Other Stories. I am a regular contributor to the fine WriterUnboxed website.
My newest nonfiction book, Sticky Fingers: Confessions of a Marginally Resistant Shoplifter, is about a crazed period (essentially all my high school years and then some) where I ran a shoplifting “business,” stealing goods like tape players, records, and lots of booze and selling them or giving them away to my friends. A mere 50 years later, I give that phase a good WTF.
I also published a bit back a how-to nonfiction book, "Think Like a Writer: How to Write the Stories You See," for those writers and would-be-writers that love language, and how words work to thrill, convince, dazzle, and excite. The book gives you tips and strategies on how to see the world as a writer, and then how to put those sights compellingly on the page.
The book also discusses writing at a structural level: how words work in sentences and how sentences work in stories (and articles), moving to how to use those elements and that writer's stance to write across genres. This is a book to jump-start your writing work--and writing play.
Hope I'm not just blathering on now, but my other interests are reading, bicycling, brain research, basketball, politics, travel, photography, chocolate, whiskey and selected nonsense--I can be a bit of a wise guy. I live in the hinterlands of Watsonville, California, surrounded by strawberry fields and the occasional Airstream.
There are more confessions on my site but I can't leave a URL here—search and find.
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