By Jenny Milchman When Steven Spielberg’s film version of Peter Benchley’s blockbuster Jaws came out, it furthered the reach of the novel, spawned (ha, get it, a fish reference?) a whole school of (I can keep going) sometimes great, sometimes comical derivations that continue to this day (I’m...
DISPATCH FROM THE CAVE
No Excuses Accepted By Tracy Clark I don’t have anything interesting to write about this time. You see, I’ve been living in a cave, figuratively not literally, for months now. Nose to the grindstone. Shoulder to the wheel. All that jazz. I have a book to finish. A deadline looming. Writing....
WENDY WHITMAN GOES ROGUE: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer
By Wendy Whitman My obsession with murder and my experience working at Court TV and on the Nancy Grace show were the catalysts for my writing journey. My debut crime thriller Premonition was meant in large part to be a tribute to all the murder victims I covered during the course of my nearly...
COAUTHORING A NOVEL
An Interview with Coauthors Tosca Lee and Marcus Brotherton By Tosca Lee It's the question we get asked all the time: How Can Two Authors Write a Novel Together? My coauthor of The Long March Home, Marcus Brotherton, and I discuss. 🙂 Tosca: This is my second time co-authoring, and it’s very...
KIMBERLY G. GIARRATANO GOES ROGUE
Grumpy Old Men as Inspiration By: Kimberly G. Giarratano Greetings from a glorious Northeast! A bit of magic has been sprinkled upon us: for the past two weeks, we have had nothing but blue skies, sunshine, and a layer of golden pollen whose goal is to take us out one-by-one (I haven’t stopped...
MY WRITING JOURNEY
The Day My Dad Changed My Life By Tosca Lee Signing the contract for my upcoming novel, The Long March Home. Authors often get asked what they hope readers will take away from their books, what their publishing journey was like and what’s next for them. But my favorite question is this: “How did...
7 TIPS TO UNPLUG & BEAT WRITER’S BLOCK
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...
A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN
You Need a You Space By Jenny Milchman They say the happiest kind of actor is a working actor, and that’s true of writers too. Lately I’ve begun to think that it may be true of all people, period. Sigmund Freud, albeit he’s be cancelled for a lot of things circa today, got it right when he said...
IS WINTER A WRITER’S FRIEND?
By Gayle Lynds Reposted from January 2018, when the snow was even deeper than it is now. Brrr! Our front yard. Yep. It’s true that winter can drive some of us writers into dark, metaphorical caves, but then we escape the despair and boredom by throwing ourselves into our writing. Whew. Or,...
BREAKING IN A NEW PAIR OF SHOES
By Tracy Clark I've had a heck of a time writing lately. Shirtsleeves up. Eyes on my laptop. Fingers on the keyboard. Digging for diamonds like those seven little Disney guys. I started a new crime series. And I’m a pantser. Feel me? This means I started with zip, which is fine. I always start...