WRITE BY HEART: Creating stories that pack an emotional punch
It’s been a rough couple of years and many of us are simply exhausted. Outrage fatigue, pandemic fatigue, crisis fatigue—all manner of fatigue has besieged us. To the point where all we feel lately is numb. At least that’s how I’ve been feeling. And then I watched two...
What I Learned from Crime Bake: A Writer’s Story
There are certain times in a writer’s life when everything changes. You may not see it at the time, but when you look back, you realize that was the moment that changed you, your writing, and your writing career forever. For me, this happened when I moved to New...
Writing Nature
When I was a very young woman, I heard a writer say that when you set a story in a given place, you should be able to name every bird, every tree, every flower in that setting. I remember thinking, “Uh oh.” As an Army brat who moved at least once a year, I barely got...
Writing About the Pandemic—or Not?
This is the question I hear all the time from writers of all levels of experience. The uncertainty of life during the pandemic has affected everyone in the book business—writers, agents, editors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, reviewers. We publishing...