I’ve just returned from a six-week cruise ship experience in the South Seas. Was it everything I’d dreamed? Of course, in some ways. Nothing beats going to sleep rocked by the gentle motion of the ocean swell. I didn’t get to see the Southern Cross because it appeared...
Radine Trees Nehring wrote an inspired blog http://radine.wordpress.com/ recently about the reasons for poor financial prospects in the mystery writing game. My heart sank as I read it because it mirrors my own experience. Even Marilyn Meredith,...
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...
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...
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...
