I imagine those of you who are mystery writers have also received this memo. Everyone is writing murder mysteries these days. There are mysteries that open an aperture into the world of dogs, of Boston gamblers, Icelandic housewives, Venetian art thieves, and even...
Am I the only writer out there who is addicted to Spider Solitaire? I can sit at my desk with my current mystery open in one screen, and all too easily switch screens, and allow myself only one game. Then two. And so it goes. When I’m feeling generous to myself I call...
What happens when an idea for a book strikes and won’t leave you alone? What if it’s something you know nothing about? Such as banjo picking, as in the second book of my second series set in the tranquil mountain town where I live in Central California? I...
I have only received one terrible review and that’s too bad because I learned a lot from the experience. I was green as grass at the new business of self-publishing in 2010 and did not hire a professional proofreader at the end of the process of publishing my first...
You’ve read all these murder mysteries of one kind and another from grisly hard-boiled noir to the sweetest cozy. You’ve seen all the tricks and seen how the detectives unravel a Gordian Knot of a story to solve the murder. You let your mind out to play imagining the...
A work of fiction has to be about something, doesn’t it? And really good books are about a lot of things, some of them heavy social issues. Raymond Chandler’s novels are about crime and corruption in the 1940s in a place he called Bay City, in truth, Santa Monica. No...
