by Isabella Maldonado The Latino equivalent of Windex is Vicks VapoRub, which is used to treat everything from a head cold to a sucking chest wound. Now you know. When I retired from police work and took up crime writing, I saw the need for a change from what usually populated bookshelves in the...
Kim Howe: Susan Elia MacNeal travels back in time to WWII to bring us a captivating story of a mother and daughter who went undercover as spies inside Los Angeles’ Nazi movement. This fierce twosome takes incredible risks to help save American democracy. Susan, welcome to the Rogues! Susan Elia...
LAURIE R. KING is known for her masterful storylines and her accuracy when it comes to all things mystery and intrigue, showcasing how research is a critical tool for fiction writers. Discover how Laurie uses her skills when it comes to getting the facts correct.
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 Isabella Maldonado I write two crime fiction series, one with a homicide detective and the other featuring a federal agent. A major difference between the two is how the setting changes the feel of the story. Having your main character work in the same place grounds your story deeply in the...
by Tracy Clark I just gave my first author presentations on craft, one on writing settings and one on building book people (characters). I think I did okay. I hope I did. But I’m a writer, not Mr. Chips, so things might have been a little, you know, shaky. I put the presentation together (with...
by Gayle Lynds This is the best writing advice I ever got. Learning to write well is like climbing a greased pole. You make a couple of feet of progress (exhilarating!), but then you slide back a foot, or more (groan!). In the beginning I was climbing and sliding, climbing and sliding, having...
by Chris Goff Recently I read a Soapbox article in Publisher’s Weekly that gave me pause. Entitled Let Fiction Be Fiction, in it the author tackles the question of who gets to tell which stories. The author’s debut novel, Other People’s Children, tells the story of a couple who, after...
by Lisa Black Young people today must have no idea why children of the 1970s had an irrational fear of quicksand—the colloidal of saturated loose sand by which one would die slowly and inexorably without hope of rescue. Even though it is impossible for a human to actually drown in quicksand, any...
By Tosca Lee The Line Between, my novel about a young woman who escapes a doomsday cult on the American Prairie just as a pandemic is sweeping across the nation (yup, I wrote a pandemic duology that released in 2019), was my tenth published novel. It taught me more lessons than I wanted to learn…...
