How trees help me write
How trees help me understand people better.
Read moreA Blog for Readers and Writers of Mystery, Crime, and Suspense Fiction
How trees help me understand people better.
Read moreMiss D’s Friday question: what do you do between drafts? I put the question to my fellow bloggers and was surprised by their answers!
Read moreSo I asked my fellow Miss Demeanors: What is the bravest thing you’ve ever done? This is what they roared.
Read moreI’ve always been a bit in awe—and not a little jealous—when I read on social media that an author is heading out for a writer’s retreat. It’s the ultimate luxury in my book—days spent in uninterrupted thinking/plotting/writing. Here are my Top Ten reasons why a writer’s retreat is worth its weight in gold.
Read moreWhat real-life story would you like to see fictionalized on page or screen? Maybe a story inspired by a weird fact? History? The odd guy who lives down the street? The woman three doors down who only leaves the house on Thursdays?
Read moreOne of the pleasures of being a writer is that it is my actual job to seek out weird facts.[…]
Read moreIf Jed Mercurio is a pantser, I’m a red herring.
Read moreThe history of Black American crime fiction dates back to the 1930s
Read moreHow long is a sentence? The answer I got in junior high school was “long enough to finish the thought.” Cheeky.
For years, the longest sentence ever written in English was said to be Molly Bloom’s 3,687-word soliloquy in the James Joyce novel Ulysses (1922). However, one of the finalists for the 2019 Booker Prize was Lucy Ellman, whose 1,000-page Ducks, Newburyport consists mostly of a single sentence that runs to 426,000 words. Beat that if you can.
Read moreReading about horrible things help us deal with them IRL.
From ancient myths to fairy tales to epic poems and literature of every era and genre, it’s the worst-case scenario that glues us to the page/stage/screen. We shudder and close our eyes trying to imagine what it’s like to go into battle or to lose someone we love. The story takes us by the hand and lets us live through the tension and fear, then lets us out at the end, still whole, our lives still intact.
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