One of the most pervasive beliefs in American publishers has been that readers will not be interested in humorous novels or in novels about Latin America. So I wrote The Better Part of Valour, a comic novel set in Columbia. Again and again, American publishers turned it down; in fact, few if any of them …Read More
CRIME & CRIMINALITY: The Amateur Sleuth in Regency England … by Darcie Wilde
Ah! The English Regency. The romance! The dances! The genteel manners, the snobbery, and the witty banter! And, oh! Those clothes! It’s a lush, intricate and magnificent setting for almost any kind of story. For a crime writer, though, it’s got some interesting pitfalls, and sneaky advantages, especially when you’re writing a mystery with an …Read More
Self-Editing One Step at a Time: Cleaning Up Those Dialogue Tags
To continue my series on self-editing tips, I’m turning my attention today to dialogue and the tags we use to identify the speakers in a conversation. This step may be combined with others during the sentence-by-sentence editing read because it addresses only these three mechanics of labeling dialogue: When dialogue is carried on between two …Read More
The Future of Fiction … by Jacqueline Seewald
Increasingly, we are seeing the blurring of borders in fiction. At one time, for example, mystery novels always contained certain clearly defined elements. There could be no paranormal explanations. Suspects always had real motives. Murders were not random. Romantic involvements were limited and not detailed. Romance novels also followed tried and true formulas and love …Read More
Take a Leap … by Jenny Sundstedt
Poor February. It’s the little brother of the calendar, never quite matching up to the longer months. But every four years, it puffs up its chest a bit with the addition of an extra day. I love the novelty of Leap Day, even though it occasionally gyps me out of a coveted Friday or Saturday …Read More
Self-Editing One Step at a Time: Weeding Out Adjectives and Adverbs
We don’t need to tell smart, intuitive readers everything and we rarely need to tell them details more than once. They will fill in the blanks as long as the blanks are not critical to the story. You can describe a protagonist (male) as 60ish with long gray hair, bronze skin, and a leathery, weathered …Read More
Self-Editing: Finding and Breaking Your Habits
Habit words. That’s what I call them. Some editors lump them into the repetitive word category. Others include them in articles about adjectives and adverbs. I’ve dubbed them habit words because they flow into our writing in the same way they clutter up our speech. The little devils were probably hardwired into our brains when …Read More
Self-Editing One Step at a Time: How to Identify Dragging Narrative
I’m focused on novel revisions and self-editing for a mystery manuscript, so I decided to publish a few posts based on segments of my Self-Editing One Step at a Time presentation/handout. Today I’m presenting a few clues to find spots in your novel that sag (as in that “sagging middle”) or drag (as in “boring …Read More
Taking the Bitter with the Sweet
I have bad news and good news. Bad: My publisher, Five Star/Cengage, is ending its mystery line and going forward only with westerns and Frontier Fiction. Those writers who had mysteries in the queue but no contract yet must start the search again….or self-publish. Good: The novel I submitted to Five Star in October …Read More
How I Wrote a Historical Novel Set in an Era I Knew Nothing About … by Jennifer Kincheloe
Five years ago, I knew nothing about the Progressive Era. I mean naught, nothing, nada. I had some vague notion that they washed their hair with egg yolks and drank Coca Cola laced with cocaine, but that was about it. I ran across a brief article about a police matron, Alice Stebbins Wells, who became …Read More
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