Welcome to my website. I am a novelist who writes about people and their problems today. I think you will enjoy discovering my stories, and getting to know my characters.

Welcome!

If you’ve found your way here, you already know a bit about who I am and what I do. After a career as a university professor, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and learned how to become a fiction writer. I turned out one novel, then another and another until there were six, plus a book of short stories wrapped around a novella. Now that this website is up and running, I can write about my personal life and some of the adventures that have made their way into my fiction. Earlier in my career I was a language student and researcher in Japan. With two companions, I sailed a small boat most of the way around the world, and for many years I had part-time residences in Switzerland and Provence. Since coming to California I’ve managed a small investment business, hiked the hills of Marin County, and learned something about the food markets in France. Take a look from time to time at my blogs. They are rooted in my activities, and will probably show you something about how I’ve changed as a result of my experience.

Recent Blogs

Beekeeping in Mill Valley

My son and I have been keeping bees on the back of my Mill Valley property for a couple of years. (He suggested that I needed to do something in my life other than writing, which was becoming somewhat obsessive.) He had learned beekeeping back in northeast Ohio when he was twelve years old. He…

Body Language

Many tools are available to writers to make characters real and three-dimensional. The most obvious are physical description and dialogue. Everyone in the world looks unique in some way, or at least unlike all the others we meet in a lifetime (there are of course identical twins, and rare cases of body-doubles that dictators are…

Friends and Characters

I made a new friend at a dinner party a couple of weeks ago. I knew because I felt that prickle of interest that takes place between a man and a woman, and I’m told can take place between any two people regardless of gender. I generally am more comfortable with women friends than men…

Fresh Thoughts

Given the nature of this website and my nature as a professional writer, you would expect a steady stream of blogs about writing. But I would not want to claim your time and attention for so tedious a task. I was receiving some bodywork the other day (I can recommend it without qualification for all…

Getting It Right

I’ve just finished writing a novel. It was hard work, and took more than a year. That’s fast, considering that my earlier books took anywhere from three to ten years to complete. But after creating the story, the hardest job in getting across the finish line is making corrections. No one writes clean copy the…

The Road Not Taken

Of the many predictable questions writers are asked (what time of day do you write being perhaps the most common) one that asks for a real response is: where do you get your ideas? Some teachers have advised me that I should sit down every day and write whatever comes into my head for twenty…

Dixon Long

Dixon Long lives in Mill Valley, California. Before moving to the Bay area in 1990, he was professor of Political Science and dean of Western Reserve College at Case Western Reserve University. His account of sailing around the world with two friends, Westward Home, was published by Carpenter Reserve Printing Company in 1979. His first novel, Brothers, was published in 2001 by Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley. He has co-authored two guides to markets in France, Markets of Provence (HarperCollins, 1966) and Markets of Paris (The Little Bookroom, 2nd Edition 2013). His short stories have appeared in several small literary magazines. Part of novella, Weekend in the Luberon, was published in ZYZZYVA 76, Spring 2006.

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