Writing police procedurals as I do, I read a lot of police procedural fiction because I enjoy it. It’s not as if I want to imagine myself in the role of the first on scene investigator. Imagine the stress of that in real life? And the smell? The bossing people around....
I liked the previous covers of my four books. But a smooth-talking Irishman, who presented as a social media expert at a conference I recently attended, persuaded me the covers looked dated. I fell under his spell and found myself agreeing I needed to update them. ...
T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropology professor at Stanford, wrote an opinion piece which appeared in the New York Times on September 19, 2013, concerning, in part, paranoid schizophrenics who have done mass shootings. Culture has an influence on the voices—the...
When a book comes alive it’s a wonderful feeling. Your words sparkle on the pages. The dialogue is snappy. You even laugh out loud at some of your one-liners. The characters leap off the page. You can’t wait to get back to working on it. Well, I’m not there yet. This...
What is the effect, upon US. culture, of printed media depicting violence? A quick Google search comes up with television and video games, but not so much on print. The American Psychological Association says there’s a link between aggression, decreased empathy, and...
Christine Brown arranged for us to do a Q & A on writing at the Frazier Park library. Frazier Park is a little town perched near Interstate-5, the river of commerce that runs from Mexico to Canada. Yes, we’re a little off the beaten track but we have a brand new...
Not everybody thinks of murder as an entertainment, Sherry Kiyler told the attendees of recent Sisters in Crime meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. Kiyler, a retired police chief, gave Homicide Survivors, Inc., http://www.azhomicidesurvivors.org/ as one example of a...
Clark is an interesting fellow I met at a crime fiction writers conference. I consider both of his novels 5-star fiction. Here’s how he describes himself: Clark Lohr grew up on a Montana farm and ranch. Most of his friends were old men who told good...
Here I am at the Southern California Writers Conference in San Diego for the weekend. I ventured out of the hotel this evening looking for some dinner, using my GPS to drive to an unfamiliar location. Not only was it dark and scary, but then thick fog rolled in off...
I like to live dangerously, tinkering with the edge of old addictions. I just laid a jigsaw puzzle out on my dining room table. Now what earthly good are jigsaw puzzles? What does hours hunched over a scattering of brightly-coloredpuzzle pieces accomplish? You might...
