It’s nice to get an early Christmas present like this: A message from my publicist that Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History was listed among the top 20 bestselling true crime books of 2010 by Library Journal. That’s some serious satisfaction, considering how hard Scott Selby and I worked on that book. When we started the project in 2007, two of the four identified thieves were still on the loose in Italy; by the time we’d finished, they’d been arrested, served th...

Editing a book -- for an author at least -- is like going to the dentist. You know you’re going to have some teeth pulled, but in the end, you’ll be better looking because of it. Knowing that, however, doesn’t always make it easier to go through.

Here’s how the process works: You spend months writing and polishing your manuscript, re-reading it incessantly to look for holes to fill, to identify gaps in logic or knowledge, and to fine-tune your sentence structure and word selecti...

Today I’m make my annual—or sometimes semiannual—pilgrimage to New York City, my yearly homage to the capital of North American publishing. Part of it is purely functional; you can’t do what you need to as an author and freelancer without being present, even if rudimentarily, in the heart of the market. My visit this time involves both advance-planning for future projects and strategery-planning for the one currently in the pipeline. Yes, I could brainstorm over e-mail or by ph...

Despite my promise to get up early to write my blogs, I’m getting a late start this morning. For one thing, it was in the low single digits outside around dawn and I knew that before I could do anything creative, I needed to get out of my nest-warm bed, bundle up and head into the razor-cold morning in search of coffee, which I’d forgotten to stock up on yesterday.

But for another, I stayed up much later than usual last night to catch Restrepo on the National Geographic channel. This...

Most writers I admire say they get their best work done first thing in the morning, preferably before dawn. Ted Kooser, the former Poet Laureate, told me that he gets up around 5 a.m. to do some chores on his farm near Lincoln, Neb. and to write for a few hours while the sun comes up. He’s written a few Pulitzer-caliber poems and is done with his work before most people are out of bed.

As much as it’s against my nature (my favorite pastime is sleeping), I also prefer to work as earl...