This novel takes place during the heat of August in the Missouri Ozark mountains. That’s really about as precise as I set the story.
I’ve made up a county so that no one can claim to have been libeled by my characters and the fates that befall them. I spend a good deal of time describing [...]
Yesterday evening I received an email from an agent I had queried only three days before. She asked to see the first five pages of my manuscript. I sent it, of course!
Here is the count as of this morning:
33 – the number of agents I have sent my basic query to
6 – the number of [...]
Maybe I should stop listening to mysteries on audio.
I had the chance to listen to the audio book of another wildly successful mystery/thriller writer. Once again, I was disappointed with what I heard. (I made a report similar to this back at this post.)
The protagonist was incorrectly suspected of murder. Oh, and she was wealthy. [...]
Not.
I’m taking a side in the usage wars.
I now insist that “blog” is not a verb. And its use as a noun is hereby restricted.
Think of this site (this blog) as a book, or better yet, as an anthology, or even better, as a magazine. The blog is the thing, so to speak, but not [...]
I never knew there was a name for this.
I have what I think is a healthy skepticism for conventional wisdom, especially in the area of writing fiction. I think conventional wisdom leads to conventional writing, and while that may lead to predictable sales, it doesn’t mean the writing is any good.
There are shelves and shelves [...]
This is a true story.
I stopped in my local Borders store one day in search of specific book. I didn’t see it on the shelf, so I went to the information desk. A nice young lady was there waiting to help me.
“Hello, I’m looking for Don Quixote, the Edith Grossman translation, in hardcover.”
“Wait, wait,” [...]
I spent most of my writing time this morning transcribing notes and making little changes — pencil work — to a few bits of fiction I’m working on. I adjusted an older short story of mine and fixed a big flaw in it, one that a couple of editors pointed out when they returned it [...]
I put the final (?) touches on chapter ten this morning. Many of these middle chapters seem aimless, as though they are not contributing to the story, but they’re actually doing a lot of set-up work. (Indeed, my characters don’t even realize that they are in the middle of a mystery and that they are [...]
