Praise for Journal of a Novel:

Harry Mark Petrakis is a wizard! He is such a clever bastard! He sends me a book, Journal of A Novel, and it's the journal he kept while writing of the Greek Revolution of the middle 1800s. So I start reading this journal and I'm snared. It's got many pieces - his life, his extended family, all of their aches and pains and diseases and depressions. Then he's telling you of his approach on the Revolution and the various stops and starts and characters and how some grow and how some are cut off never knowing how it will end till the mantle of decisions descends often on its own.

So there's his life, the Revolution, his musings on them, his reflections on writing, his frustrations, his rare joy, all while he stumbles forward to completion but never committing himself to rashness. And all the while, he's teaching the budding writer what it's all about, what the process entrails, what a potpourri it all is. Always open to change but never divesting himself of that central core of purpose and aim. An iron core midst swirling gases of varying makeups and even without commenting on it, that iron core just keeps inching or lunging forward.

Perseverance "up the wazoo!" I'm impressed and this journal should be thrust into every classroom of budding writers to give them the idea not easily purchased elsewhere, of what the hell writing is all about. A text that teaches so much!

Edward Asner (Studio City, CA)

In Journal of a Novel, Harry Mark Petrakis reveals personal aspects of his life and work. The complex relationship between writing and living is clearly drawn, and we see at work here the process by which a writer turns his raw experience into art.

The creative process is the subject here, begun while he was engaged in writing his historical novel on the Greek War of Independence, "The Hour of the Bell." It shows a writer fully committed to his craft.

"All the years I have lived, loved and written stories," he writes, "have been moving me toward this book that challenges the myths of my heritage."

Journal of a Novel records a writer's daily struggle with discipline and solitude, aging and death. The entries gain an added poignance because they were written while Greek and Turkish hatreds once again flared on the island of Cyprus, and as America endured the continuing trauma of the Vietnam war. These events have their impact on novel and journal, and both become meditations on innocence and guilt, revolution and the longing for freedom, and the brutal inhumanity of war, however just its cause may appear.