The newspaper and coffee start to my day began when I retired eleven years ago. The habit is firmly entrenched. This business of newspapers dropping like flies bothers me more than drops in the stock market. When one of the Denver papers bit the dust not too long ago, I was upset, even though I …Read More
My Colorado Authors Project — Mike Befeler
I love the authors of Colorado. Once a week I plan to blog about one or more of those talented and friendly folks in the hopes a few more people take a look at their books. Today I want to tell you about Mike Befeler, a Boulder resident whose first mystery was published in 2007. …Read More
Happy Mother’s Day!
Note that I, being a mother, slept in today. Doesn’t matter than my kids are all grown up and live many states away. I pamper myself on Mother’s Day. I already called my own mother, who is celebrating her 90th birthday today. My brother is preparing k-bobs on the grill for her. He already made …Read More
The Grizzly Dream
I have a lot of bizarre dreams, sometimes nightmares. I’ve plucked a couple of story ideas from those subconscious, unconscious mind pictures, even created a character for a short story that has grown into the fourth draft of a novel. The dream I had night before last has curious possibilities. I was walking on a …Read More
Do Short Blogs Attract More Readers?
I don’t know about the rest of you blog readers, but when I’m blog-hopping from favorite to favorite, I tend to skip the long blogs so I can cover more ground, visit more bloggers, and leave more comments. My intentions are good. I always make a note of the longer blogs so I can go …Read More
Introducing Sylvia Thorn and Willie Grisseljon
After years of reading mystery series, and wishing some of those authors would put out a book every six months, I decided to write a mystery of my own. I wanted to understand more about the writing process–creating a character who can grow through multiple stories, properly construct a good story arc, and place clues …Read More
Avoiding the Aaaargh! Moments In Blogging
The best books on writing tell us to set our manuscripts aside for days, weeks, even months before we do final revisions. If we give ourselves time away from our work, we have a better chance of seeing our prose as a reader (or agent or editor) would see it. We can catch errors we …Read More
A Good Lesson from the Blogbooktour Class
Here it is, only day five of the Blog a Day Challenge for the blogbooktour class. Since I’m in Brookline, Mass. using my tiny laptop instead of home in Colorado with my desktop and roomy work space, these first few days have been more of a challenge than I anticipated. I write my blog in …Read More
Writing (and Deleting) the Memory Dump in Fiction
The setting for my first mystery, The Prairie Grass Murders, was central Illinois. A man’s body was discovered in a field on a farm that strongly resembled the farm on which my younger brother and I grew up. The protagonists of the Sylvia and Willie mysteries are brother and sister (although Sylvia is the youngest …Read More
Social Distancing
There was a headline on a swine flu story yesterday that mentioned social distancing. I didn’t read the whole article because I understood exactly what the phrase meant. I’ve been doing the same thing since my husband and I arrived at the airport last Thursday. To me, social distancing means I don’t shake hands with …Read More