Larry Benjamin. Wordsmith. Writer. Author.

Today is the release of my third novel—my first full length work since Unbroken which was released in 2013. This is my fifth release in six years—still it feels like the first time I’ve ever released a book. It’s accompanied by the same worry, the same doubt: did I write the best book I could? Will readers like it? Will anyone read it? On Saturday, we saw Diana Ross in concert at the Mann Center in Philly. The outing was part of our new effort to get out more, to do things together. Our therapist says that’s important—yes, we have a therapist; after twenty years together, the waters of matrimony are still sometimes difficult to navigate. Anyway, back to Miss Ross. I watched her closely, as I watch all artists—and let’s face it we writers are artists, too. I was impressed by her energy, her humanity: from the stage, she came off not so much as a diva as a person, doing her best and hoping to please a crowd. Her daughter opened for her and she brought her grandchildren on stage—...

This morning at 2 am EST, after eight months, 61,000 words and eighty-three drafts, I sent my newest book to my editor at Beaten Track Publishing . I’m romantically inclined to say writing this book was a labor of love, but the practical me says it was just labor. Eight months is pretty good for me. Usually it takes me a year to write a book, though Unbroken only took nine months. I am amazed I wrote 30,000 words in the last three months so essentially half the book was written in three months. Reading it though a last time this week before submitting it, I realized once again that the story I tell isn’t the story I sat down to write back in August. And months into the writing of it, I realized I had to restructure it because the way I envisioned telling the story—in flashback, starting at the end and working forward—just didn’t work for the story. At first the idea of writing a different book and structuring it differently to my first idea, scared me, but this is my fifth ...

Don’t judge a book by its cover. We’ve had that drilled into us—at least my generation did, and, to a large extent, we believed it—I believed and I still do. At least as far as people go. And dogs—you ever meet a dog who looks mean and you want to step back but then he approaches you gently and licks your hand? Anyway, never judge a book by its cover, unless of course, it is a book . I’ve been thinking about covers a lot lately. It started when we released Vampire Rising , my allegorical Vampire novella. It pays homage to Bram Stoker’s Dracula while reinventing the Vampire genre. In the story I tell there were certain elements that helped tell the story—mockingbirds who appear wherever Vampires gather, the iron gates that demarcates the separation between the Vampire state and the human world. And the story is described in grays and purples. So I wanted to include all of those elements that in the cover. The Original Cover When my publisher notified me that they wou...

My new short story, “The Christmas Present,” is now available as an individual eBook for just $0.99. All proceeds from the sale of this story go to benefit The Trevor Project . “The Christmas Present” is part of a holiday anthology which brings together 24 authors from the UK, the USA, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.   When my publisher and friend, Debbie McGowan, first approached me about joining the project, I knew I wanted mine to be a story of hope, because so many of our youth, so many of the youth The Trevor Project works to support, feel they are without hope. And I knew it would be set at Christmas, the season of hope. When I was a kid, hope was what got me through. But for me the season of hope was always in September. At the start of each new school year, I would be filled with hope: the hope that the bullying would stop, the hope that this year I would make a friend, the hope that this year the boy I liked would like me back. I remember during the last president...

Years ago, we moved to the ‘transitional” neighborhood of Germantown (in Philadelphia), then said to be on the verge of a comeback. There was much talk about The Germantown Renaissance which was talked about breathlessly and in the tone of reverence usually reserved for people who “know” computers and pop stars who appear in bikinis two weeks after giving birth. Sixteen years later there is still talk of The Germantown Renaissance . This reminds me of all the news that short stories were poised for a comeback, its return to popularity fueled, in part, by shrinking attention spans and the proliferation of electronic devices.   I am as dubious about the Short Story Renaissance as I am about The Germantown Renaissance. Short stories seem to be the stepchild of literature.   Publishers don’t seem to want to publish them. When I started shopping around my first collection of short stories, I was told that no one would publish a collection of short stories, unless I’d first writ...

Probably not many people know this but short stories were my first love. I cut my teeth, so to speak, on short stories. My second book, Damaged Angels , a collection of short stories, was actually the first book I wrote. But I was told more than once that I needed to publish a novel before I could publish short stories. At any rate, this year I’m returning to short stories—at least for a while. Writing novels is great because you have a longer time frame— What Binds Us spans a decade and Unbroken unfolds over 40 years—so you have time to develop your characters, to let readers watch them change and grow.   But I wanted to go back to short form fiction which has a much smaller time period.    My newest story is the holiday themed, “The Christmas Present,” which is one of 24 stories from the Beaten Track Publishing’s holiday anthology, Boughs of Evergreen . The story spans about two weeks in the life of a gay teenage who is neglected, marginalized, without hope u...