About

An accomplished novelist, screenwriter, musician, and businessman, Stephen Smoke successfully navigates the worlds of art and business. He is the author of 29 published books (19 novels), including Black Butterfly (HarperCollins), Pacific Coast Highway (HarperCollins), Pacific Blues (HarperCollins), and The Prince of Palos Verdes (White Lighthouse Books) under his own and other names.

He has also written and directed feature films, including “Street Crimes” (starring Dennis Farina) and “Final Impact,” and has written screenplays for others, including “Magic Kid.”

He founded and published Mystery Magazine, and published the first online mystery magazine (Hamilton Caine’s Mystery Digest, on CompuServe). He is now putting together the first “digital tablet mystery magazine,” scheduled to debut in May 2011.

Mr. Smoke is also a published songwriter, and recorded an album (in support of his novel, Trick of the Light) on which several well-known musicians, including Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, Garth Hudson (the keyboard player in Bob Dylan’s backup band, The Band), played on various tracks. He is also a member of ASCAP and regularly collects royalties for music he has written for feature films. He occasionally performs “Storyteller Concerts,” during which he plays songs from his books, explaining the context in which the songs were written and how they pertain to the novels.

In 1997, his company, Onlineseminars, produced one of the first continuing education for-credit online courses. Later, with a partner, he published the first Standards for Online Learning.

In the mid 90s Mr. Smoke started working on his Bill of Responsibilities series and in 2002 finished work on the Teen Bill of Responsibilities Course, which has been taught in several Southern California schools.

In January 2007 Mr. Smoke published Writing the Novel, a workbook based on a previous workbook, Stephen Smoke’s Mystery Writing Course. He reworked that course into a classroom course and taught three 8-week sessions at the Palos Verdes Art Center during 2006. “The immediate feedback I received every week helped me to refine the course exercises to the degree that I know the course works…if students actually do the exercises.”

In 2008 Stephen published a mystery entitled The Prince of Palos Verdes.

Since finishing that book Stephen has been working on Cathedral of the Senses, the follow-up novel to his successful inspirational/metaphysical novel, Trick of the Light (Beyond Words, the publisher of The Secret). Over the past two years he has been writing the novel and most of the songs. The novel and a companion music album containing songs written by Stephen and recorded by other artists, are now available at The Sedona Sessions website. You can read  excerpts from the book on this site or by going to Amazon and clicking Look Inside.