Too Many Cats: My life was filled with cats, and writing crime fiction.
I moved to a mountain village in Central California where a small group of good-hearted people were battling a desperate overpopulation of unwanted cats. We started a chapter of the SPCA. Fostering...
Mentors
I don’t think I’ve had a real up close mentor, mostly because I’ve been too over-awed by the ones I admire and too shy to ask for help. But I’ve watched a lot of writers from a distance and learned...
Multi-tasking
Is there anything in life that doesn’t require multi-tasking skills of some sort or another? At any stage in life? Employers want workers who can juggle. Husbands, children, lovers, and readers...
Finding a New Way to Kill Someone Off
Today I am hosting my friend Marilyn Meredith. She is sharing news of her new book, A Cold Death. Be sure to read to the end of this post to enter Marilyn's contest. When you’ve written as many...
What Writers Do to Sell a Few Books
So I got an invitation to sign books more than one hundred miles away, and a two-and-a-half-hour drive from my mountain top village to coastal California. Specifically, Santa Maria. A bookstore...
The Cruelest Enemy: Self-doubt
The best writing advice I ever got was watching the agony of a writer who couldn’t bring himself to write The End. As a result, he never finished anything and still remains in the ranks of the...
Writing Something Different for a Change
I adapted a short story I wrote long ago for three characters. We have two little theater companies in our mountain village in Central California. I went to a first reading a couple of years ago...
I thought everyone could write if they just sat down and put their mind to it. As my facility for words came easily to me, I never thought it was important. A facility for manipulating numbers was...
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...
