Patricia Stoltey

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Avoiding the Aaaargh! Moments In Blogging

May 6, 2009 By: Patricia

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

Category: Uncategorized

A Good Lesson from the Blogbooktour Class

May 5, 2009 By: Patricia

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

Category: Uncategorized

Writing (and Deleting) the Memory Dump in Fiction

May 4, 2009 By: Patricia

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

Category: Uncategorized

Social Distancing

May 3, 2009 By: Patricia

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

Category: Uncategorized

Seeing Our Work With the Reader’s Eye

May 2, 2009 By: Patricia

Self-editing is one of the most critical parts of the creative writing process, and one of the hardest to master. Over the last year, I read and critiqued a dozen memoir and fiction manuscripts. All were excellent stories, worthy of publication. All contained at least two of the most common bad habits writers have. In …Read More

Category: Uncategorized

Finding Story Ideas in the Strangest Places

May 1, 2009 By: Patricia

Writers need to keep their eyes open and their wits about them at all times. A long day of travel and a middle seat in the back row of an airplane create opportunities to overhear interesting dialogue. Annoying people make excellent victims. A day in a hotel room with no window triggers a setting. People-watching …Read More

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Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Pandemic?

April 29, 2009 By: Patricia

Wouldn’t you know it. A few days before a scheduled trip, virus hell breaks loose. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with birds sucked into jet engines, now we have to worry about viruses spreading among the passengers by air recirculated during a four-hour flight. I’m telling you, I have a couple …Read More

Category: Uncategorized

Friday’s Excuses for Not Working on My Novel

April 24, 2009 By: Patricia

1. Critiques to do for writers’ group. 2. A trip to the post office to mail materials to publisher. 3. Write and post blog. 4. Answer important e-mails. Scan unimportant e-mails. 5. Tried to figure out where the time goes.

Category: Uncategorized

Seven Things I Learned About Twitter in the First Three Days

April 21, 2009 By: Patricia

I spent most of my first three days on Twitter reading random Tweets and searching for Twitterers to follow. Here’s what I’ve learned so far: 1. I have more fun stalking (I mean “following”) people I know than following strangers. For instance, I find it incredibly motivating to know a friend in my town has …Read More

Category: Uncategorized

White bricks and hollyhocks

April 17, 2009 By: Patricia

When I was very young, maybe three or four years old, my mother and I stayed with my father’s parents while Dad was in the army. My grandparents lived on a farm in central Illinois in an old two-story brick farmhouse painted white. I can picture the white paint chipping off the bricks, smell lye …Read More

Category: Uncategorized

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Meet Patricia

I read, I write, I blog, and sometimes I do the laundry and cook. My 2014 novel, Dead Wrong, was a finalist in the thriller category of the 2015 Colorado Book Awards. Wishing Caswell Dead (Five Star/Cengage, December 20, 2017) is a historical mystery set in 1830s Illinois in the fictitious Village of Sangamon. The novel was a finalist for the 2018 Colorado Book Awards for General Fiction. Read More…

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