Waiting for Something to Happen: the suspense

I’ve got a novel with an editor and an EBook on writing suspense in the pipeline, waiting for something to happen to push it toward publication. It’s an uncomfortable place, jammed up in a bottleneck. Both these projects took a longer time than when I started...

Writing Snappy Dialogue

You can write snappy dialogue even if you don’t consider yourself to be the most entertaining talker at the party. There are tips and tricks. Thought I’d excerpt a passage from my  EBook in the “Writing Your First Mystery” series, just to let...

The Fun of Writing Crime Fiction

I knew that if I was going to write a novel, I was going to have fun writing crime fiction. It was fun getting back at the bullies and jerks, the gold-diggers, troublemakers, and narcissists in your life. I was going to make them pay as the villain in my story....

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 from them. Also I live in an out-of-the-way village about 70 miles...

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 of consequence, after all, because I spent more than a score of years...