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
Seeing Our Work With the Reader’s Eye
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
Finding Story Ideas in the Strangest Places
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
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Pandemic?
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
Friday’s Excuses for Not Working on My Novel
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.