I see lots of women my age trundling craft supplies into the clubhouse: lace making, quilting, scrapbooking, card creation. I pass by hearing them laughing and having a good time. I live in a tiny mountain village in the mountains a good bit north of the Los Angeles...
I’ve read one too many books that get a good story going then drop into the past tense to catch us up on why all these exciting events have happened. I’ve just published a 20,000 word EBook on the subject of Writing Backstory in Your Mystery. It’s the current one in...
I also blog on a site called LadyKillers where the topic turned to favorite expressions of our characters. I’m not aware that the four main characters in my two series of mysteries have favorite expressions. I’m trying and trying to think. You as readers will have to...
Distinctions about what readers like to read and what writers write can be divided neatly. You can find my own subgenre of the mystery crime/suspense thriller genre on the police procedural branch of the subgenre tree. Specifically, the whodunits. I like the cerebral...
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 more of consequence, because I spent more than a score of years as an...
I’m the rank amateur in another blog that I contribute to called Ladykillers as far as making preparations to write. Even though I’ve published 6 well-received mysteries and 4 EBooks on the subject of “Writing Your First Mystery” since 2010, it’s not because I’m so...
So far it’s the series of short eBooks on “Writing Your First Mystery.” These five eBook primers on the architecture of the mystery novel are close to the best thing I’ve written. Partly because they seem to reach out to the solitary writers out there, maybe a...
I’m escaping winter in my California mountain village. So I’m looking for a furnished rental place of some kind in Ventura, California. It’s not so easy because I want to bring my two cats along. Landlords have had bad experiences, and I understand that....
My beloved companion dog, Lily, died a week ago now. Over last weekend, I cried so hard for her I made myself sick. That phase of grieving has passed. Most of us have lost a pet, so I can write about Lily knowing you will understand how hard and how completely you can...
I no longer have to look behind me before I move my writing chair, because my life companion, my dog Lily, died on Friday. Most of us with a human heart know what it is to love an animal, and the heartsick loss you live with when they die. She was 14 after all, and I...
