Apparently, having a social media presence means more than being Facebook friends with a couple hundred former schoolmates. No, liking people’s kids’ prom pictures and sharing links to Huffington Post articles with like-minded folks does not constitute a “platform.”...

I am going to be reading at a couple of events in June. (Stay tuned. Details to follow.) I recently saw the poster for Noir at the Bar at Kew & Willow Books, and my name appeared as “Jill Block”, without my middle initial. I stared at it. Did it matter? Minutes...

As an attorney, I write commercial real estate documents which are often 100+ pages long. Granted, I never start with a blank page, but each deal is different and each document has to address the nuances of the particular transaction. The good news is that the last...

When I was in the fourth grade, three or four of my classmates and I were put into an experimental reading group, which in fact was not a group at all. We were each free to choose the books we wanted to read. I don’t recall if we chose books from the school library,...

A couple of months ago, a donorschoose request for a charitable contribution caught my eye. A first grade teacher in Queens was seeking to raise money for a “Passion Library”, a section of the classroom library that would house books on diverse topics, cultivating...

A few years ago, I attended an open-house/info session for an MFA writing program. At that point, I had written three stories, one of which turned out to be the beginning of what would become The Truth About Parallel Lines. My first story had been published about six...

Once I committed to self-publishing The Truth About Parallel Lines, it was up to me to come up with a cover. I had some ideas. I found an iPhone app that let me try different things. During down time at a law firm partners’ retreat in Scottsdale, I wrestled with...

I am a one-book-at-a-time reader. An in bed, before I go to sleep, reader. An every single night, no matter what, reader. Most of the time, an ebook reader. A reader of general fiction, memoir, true crime, not-true crime, mystery and detective novels, historical...

Can you hear that? That is the sound of my literary clock ticking. It took me two years to write The Truth About Parallel Lines, which, in transactional real estate lawyer years, is a lifetime. Once I’d finished it I was eager to do something with it. I was anxious...