By Alex Kava In honor of National Dog Month, I want to share how one of my characters—a favorite of readers as well as my own—came to life. Grace is a scrappy, sixteen-pound Jack Russell terrier. In my Ryder Creed series, Creed is a former Marine K9 handler who now owns a training facility...
By Alex Kava The reading experience is a very personal one. As authors, we transport readers to a different place and introduce them to strangers we hope they care about. And, if we’re lucky, we capture their attention and imaginations for 300-400 pages. But what about afterwards? We authors tend...
By Alex Kava Research shows that reading fiction beats stress better than any other activity, including listening to music or taking a walk. It lowers the heart rate and eases tension in the muscles. It also creates a distraction by transporting our minds away from whatever is causing our stress....
By Alex Kava According to artist, Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” But what if it’s not about inspiration? What if you’re really stuck in a manuscript. You can’t move forward no matter how many bad paragraphs you force yourself to...
By Alex Kava A Christmas Carol, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. They’ve become synonymous with Christmas, but did you know they almost didn’t happen? A Christmas Carol In 1843, Charles Dickens already enjoyed literary success with several novels, including Oliver Twist....
by Alex Kava Last month, Netflix’s DAHMER—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was the streaming platform’s most watched new show ever in its first week. At a time when violent crime makes the daily news, what is it about serial killers that we can’t stop watching? Harold Schechter, author of The...
by Alex Kava Alex Kava’s Grace and Maggie O’Dell are two of readers favorite characters. Last month, I received this Facebook message from a reader with a great question: “Maggie O’Dell was my introduction to thrillers back when I was maybe 14 or 15 years old, so I’m really happy there’s this...
by Alex Kava Spoiler alert! It’s a good thing. It was nine years ago this summer when I decided to write a new series. The latest installment (#11, Stranded) in my long-running FBI profiler series was scheduled for release in August that year. Pre-orders outpaced previous books. The publisher even...
I’ve always been a fan of classic movies. “Sorry, Wrong Number,” “Gaslight,” “Rear Window.” Talk about building suspense. The classics definitely knew how to do it. I’m a visual writer, so I need a scene to play out in my mind before I can put it into words. But to build suspense, it’s not just...
