Patricia Stoltey

Author

Twenty Minutes in the Closet with Twitter

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I know. The title makes no sense. Stick around and I’ll explain. We’ve had strange weather in Northern Colorado the last couple of weeks. Lots of rain. Hail that shredded gardens. Wind. A few tornadoes around Denver and on the eastern plains. Yesterday was stranger than most at my house. My second floor office space, …Read More

Colorado Author — Sandi Ault

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Sandi Ault’s first Jamaica Wild mystery, Wild Indigo, was released in January 1, 2007, followed quickly by Wild Inferno in 2008, and Wild Sorrow, released in March 2009. Jamaica, who begins the series as a Bureau of Land Management agent in New Mexico, is a student of Pueblo culture, an interest that often gets her …Read More

The Search for Good Ideas

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I wanted to use the quote, “No good deed goes unpunished,” in a story, and it occurred to me that although I use the phrase from time to time, I had no idea of its origin. I pulled my copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from my bookcase and found the phrase first in the index …Read More

The Rest of the Story

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So, as I was saying yesterday, things changed in my leisure and writing life at the end of 2003. That’s when I signed up for a novel-writing class at our Senior Center. The instructor was Brian Kaufman, a local author traditionally published by a small Northern Colorado press. After the class was over, several of …Read More

How Writers Pay Their Dues

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I don’t need to tell writers what that means. Most of us practice our craft for years before we have a manuscript good enough to submit to an agent or publisher. Once we work up the courage, we send out enough hard copy queries, partials, and manuscripts to take down a hundred trees. We work …Read More

The First Time

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Oh, don’t get your hopes up. I’m not writing about that first time. I’m talking about the first time I was published. It was April 1990. The magazine was Popular Communications. An article I’d written on ham radio was incorporated into The Ham Column: Getting Started as a Radio Amateur. The article, What’s a Neat …Read More

Colorado Author — Lynda Hilburn

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I know some of you folks like vampires. Most of you know by now that I do not. Even so, in the interest of doing a competent interview with Colorado author Lynda Hilburn for the Sisters in Crime — Rocky Mountain Chapter website, I read The Vampire Shrink (Medallion Press, 2007). This novel is the …Read More

Painless Book Promotion — Wishful Thinking?

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When I say painless, I’m talking about promotional efforts that don’t require me to get dressed up, get in the car (with a box of books in the trunk, just in case), drive between 10 and 200 miles to a bookstore, tote my books and bookmarks and postcards and bowl of Hershey Kisses inside, sit …Read More

Retiring From Florida

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When my husband and I retired and left Florida, we selected half a dozen cities to visit across the United States before making a final decision. We knew we wanted to live in a college town, and preferred a population of 100,000 to 125,000. After eleven years in South Florida, we also wanted interesting terrain …Read More

Killer First Sentences — June 3, 2009

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First sentences are hard. Agents and editors give all kinds of conflicting advice on panels and in workshops, on their websites or in books. One says a novel should never open with dialogue. Another says she loves a book to jump into dialogue from the get-go. A writing manual tells us the first sentence should …Read More