The 3 Years it took to write By Accident

The 3 Years it took to write By Accident

It’s taken 3 years to bring By Accident to publication.  By Accident is the fifth in my Santa Monica police procedural series. Back in the day, whenever that was, I could write one crime novel a year. That was then. This is now. Things have happened in the meantime....

Waiting for Something to Happen: the suspense

I’ve got a novel with an editor and an EBook on writing suspense in the pipeline, waiting for something to happen to push it toward publication. It’s an uncomfortable place, jammed up in a bottleneck. Both these projects took a longer time than when I started...

Writing Snappy Dialogue

You can write snappy dialogue even if you don’t consider yourself to be the most entertaining talker at the party. There are tips and tricks. Thought I’d excerpt a passage from my  EBook in the “Writing Your First Mystery” series, just to let...

The Fun of Writing Crime Fiction

I knew that if I was going to write a novel, I was going to have fun writing crime fiction. It was fun getting back at the bullies and jerks, the gold-diggers, troublemakers, and narcissists in your life. I was going to make them pay as the villain in my story....

Proofreading Your own Work

No one can proofread their own work with any competence. The mind is tricky, inserting words that don’t lie on the printed page. Ever tried to read those garbled words/passages that show up on Facebook? As long as the first and last letters of the word are correct,...