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About Keith Cronin

Author of the novels ME AGAIN, published by Five Star/Gale; and TONY PARTLY CLOUDY (published under his pen name Nick Rollins), Keith Cronin is a corporate speechwriter and professional rock drummer who has performed and recorded with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, and Pat Travers. Keith's fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Amarillo Bay, The Scruffy Dog Review, Zinos, and a University of Phoenix management course. A native of South Florida, Keith spends his free time serenading local ducks and squirrels with his ukulele.

Recent Posts by this author:

  • If I Knew Then What I Know Now
  • When a Bad Person Makes Good Art
  • Shakespeare in Space – with Lasers!
  • Getting Ugly
  • In Which a White Guy Talks about Cultural Appropriation
  • If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say
  • Seeing a Story through New Eyes
  • Actively Defending the Passive Voice
  • Take Your Reader to Another World
  • Too Late to Start Writing?
  • Writing Under Pressure
  • Taking the Standing Desk to the Next Level

    • If I Knew Then What I Know Now

    By 28 Comments

    past meets present
    The author before and after learning how to use a semicolon

    I get approached from time to time by aspiring new writers, asking for advice on how to get started. The longer I’ve been doing this, the harder it gets to answer them. At this point I’ve been in the game nearly 20 years, so how do I condense what I’ve learned into a quick conversation or a brief email? And what if they are interested in a completely different type of writing than the kind that has made me as rich and famous as I currently am? (Hmmm – now that I think about it, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But I digress…)

    So how to advise them? Do I lecture them on the ever-changing industry? Warn them of the dangers of reading the works of Clive Cussler? Or simply hand them a dog-eared copy of The Elements of Style and turn around and run? Depending on who asks, it’s hard to determine which advice would be the most useful.

    When in doubt, fire up the time machine!

    I’ve been binge-watching the old Stargate SG-1 TV series recently, and several of the stories focus on time travel, a concept that has always fascinated me. In a couple of episodes, the main characters manage to pass messages to versions of themselves who are living in a different time.

    This got me to thinking: what kind of messages would Current-Day Keith send to Past Keith?

    After considering obvious nuggets like “buy stock in Amazon” and “don’t enroll in Trump University,” I started thinking about what I would tell Keith The Writer From The Past (or, KTWFTP). Since SG-1 episodes usually incorporate a ticking clock or some other increasingly urgent complications, I decided to ramp up the pressure, and limit myself to five pieces of advice. Here’s what I came up with to share with the younger (and yes, hairier) Keith.

    1. Know your genre – and its conventions.
    Probably the biggest – and hardest – lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that genre matters. Historically the genre of a book just wasn’t something I thought or cared about – as a reader or as a writer. But after writing one hard-to-categorize manuscript after another, the first message I would pass on to KTWFTP is to pick a damn genre already. It will make things SO much simpler.

    Why? Genre simplifies things by setting expectations. It helps an agent sell your book. It helps a publisher market your book. It helps a reader choose your book.

    And if you’re self-publishing, it helps YOU market your book, which is utterly crucial. In an era when anybody can publish anything, you need a way to make your book stand out to your potential readers. [Read more…]

    When a Bad Person Makes Good Art

    By 56 Comments

    I like to think I’m a man of conviction. The kind of man who acts swiftly to right a wrong, who won’t tolerate an injustice, nor support or enable morally questionable behavior. For example, a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine alerted me that somebody had posted a racist sentiment on my Facebook […]

    Shakespeare in Space – with Lasers!

    By 30 Comments

    I recently stumbled onto an online discussion about animated films, where somebody referred to The Lion King as having been inspired by Shakespeare’s classic play Hamlet. That was news to me, and it made me think about other films that I had belatedly learned were inspired by Shakespeare plays, such as 10 Things I Hate […]

    Getting Ugly

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    My freshman year in college, I lived in a large dormitory. It was a tough year, because I was bullied relentlessly by two other freshmen, one of whom was my roommate. While his assaults were verbal, the other guy, who lived down the hall, was far more threatening to me, with the hint of violence […]

    In Which a White Guy Talks about Cultural Appropriation

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    DISCLAIMER: The views presented in today’s post do not necessarily reflect those of Writer Unboxed or its other contributors. They are solely the opinions of the author of this post, and should not be read while flossing, practicing goat yoga, or ghost-writing a book for James Patterson.  Last September – before being eclipsed by our […]

    If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say

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    I’ve been an avid Amazon shopper since the mid-90s. It started with books, but as we moved into the 21st century it’s come to where I now buy everything from groceries to musical instruments from this Seattle-based behemoth. From the start, one of the biggest differentiating features Amazon offered was its user reviews. I have […]

    Actively Defending the Passive Voice

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    As writers, we are told about many rules we’re supposed to follow. Avoid adverbs. Don’t start with a prologue. Eschew the passive voice. Don’t use words like “eschew.” On the off chance that someone does say “eschew,” say “gesundheit!” Okay, maybe not all of those are well-established rules, but the first few definitely are. And […]

    Take Your Reader to Another World

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    Donald Maass’ inspiring post last week showed us how we can tap into vivid personal memories to add new levels of delight (AKA “pixie dust”) to our storytelling. Later that week, Kathryn Craft’s wonderful post delved into how we can use setting to reinforce the emotional state of our characters. Today I’m going to look […]

    Too Late to Start Writing?

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    There’s no question that we are living in a society obsessed with youth. We base many of our increasingly unrealistic standards for physical beauty on the premise that we all have expiration dates, after which we are simply no longer attractive. We celebrate and idolize young people who succeed in sports, business, and the arts. […]

    Writing Under Pressure

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    I recently stumbled across something called Parkinson’s Law. Originally expressed in a humorous essay published in the mid-1950s, this law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” The author, Cyril Northcote Parkinson, based this observation on his experience in the British Civil Service, and he intended this “law” […]

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