Okay, the rumors have to stop. I’m nipping them in the bud . . . now. A good cyber-buddy of mine (with a book coming out next month . . . check it out) emailed me after I posted on one of my many email loops. I’d mentioned I had a book due in seven weeks. She commented that she’d read somewhere that it only took me two months to write a book. Uh, no. I did write a book in six weeks. It was the unpublished futuristic that garnered me my only editor request for a full manuscript out… Read More

There are only two ways to write. Either put your fingers on a keyboard and type away, or pick up a pen and do it the old-fashioned way. Now that you know how to write, you might ask why are there so many dang rules out there? That you have to plot (or not); that you can never change POV mid-scene (except sometimes); that you have to introduce your hero/heroine by page 32 (or the end of chapter one, or chapter five . . . ) We all have rules we like and follow (most of the time.) And because… Read More

I read a lot of true crime. IN COLD BLOOD hooked me twentysome years ago, not only because of Capote’s compelling narrative, but because of the story–a real, heartbreaking, tragic tale of a murdered family of four in Kansas and two psychopaths who met in prison. What hooked me with Capote was his ability to draw the reader into the story, build suspense and emotion, almost as if the story were fictional when, in fact, it’s true. It was also my first look into the minds of killers. Capote, and subsequently Edgar-award winning author Vincent Bugliosi, a former L.A. prosecutor… Read More

Okay, I’ll admit it. I love the hero’s journey. No, I don’t use it to plot my books. No, I don’t make sure that I have every step of the journey in my revisions. What I love is when I finish a book and can see the hero’s journey seamlessly laid out, the layering of journey upon journey, intersecting at key points in the story. If I can’t see the journey after I’m done, I know I have some work to do. Why? Because the hero’s journey is part of our storytelling heritage, the nexus that unites all of us… Read More

There’s blogs all over cyberspace this week talking about what happened at the Romantic Times conference in Daytona Beach, so I won’t bore you with redundant details. If you want some good wrap-ups, check out Lori Armstrong over at First Offenders, or Kayla Perrin over at Literary Chicks. Eileen Rendahl, my RT roommate who also lives outside Sacramento, and I arrived very late Tuesday night. We walked into our room . . . right above the ocean. We opened the sliding glass door and wham, there was the beach and ocean and birds. It was perfect weather, neither hot nor… Read More

Authors tend to be the last to know what’s going on with their books. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been kept in the loop regarding most aspects of my books journey from production to shelf, but there are a few things that came as a surprise. Like, when I walked into Target and saw THE PREY sitting on an endcap with a BREAKOUT BOOK sticker. It would not have been a surprise if I saw it a week or two after the release date. But this was two MONTHS after the release date. I thought Target just didn’t pick up… Read More

I remember one of the first questions my agent asked me when we were discussing representation was how many books I could write in a year. Her comment was that publishers really wanted at least one book every nine months. I told her that was definitely possible, and my goal was to eventually write four books a year. My long term writing goal has always been to produce four books a year once all my kids are in school. (Wow, six-and-a-half hours of uninterrupted writing time . . . I can hardly wait!) Why? Two reasons: First, I have so… Read More

Okay, we have a theme this week and my diversion is . . . I’m writing about something completely different. Which is really the story of my writing life. It took me years to get serious about my writing. Why? Because every time I started a story, I’d get 50-300 pages into it and then . . . get a better idea and start something new. But I have a good reason for going off on a tangent today. Several authors and I were chatting on-line (okay, there’s MY biggest diversion from writing: the Internet. End of story. See, what… Read More

. . . one of us. That’s right, one of the women at Murder She Writes is the dastardly villain. We’re on a boat. Why? Maybe it’s a murder mystery cruise. And Carson is there for any number of reasons . . . probably nothing to do with the murder. But he’s the only one who can solve it because everyone is a suspect, particularly the five women who had the means to kill . . . who? The most important clue about a killer is the victim. Who was killed? Where? How? No throwing overboard, that’s no fair, we… Read More

A couple months ago I wrote about “hooking” . . . how the first line or paragraph is crucial. But what about cliffhangers? How the author ends a chapter or keeps the story moving with a series of ups and downs so that you 1) don’t want to put down the book, and 2) if you have to put down the book, you can’t wait to pick it up again. I think the first part of creating that “I can’t wait to pick up this book again” is the characters–you feel like you know them, you want to find out… Read More