The Blood and Guts of Crime Investigation

I’m back from the Writers’ Police Academy’s (WPA’s) 2019 MurderCon, a conference so packed full of forensic and investigative information I haven’t even begun to unpack everything I stuffed into my brain while there. I don’t go to a lot of writing conferences, but this one offered so much valuable information for a suspense and […]

Playing Town

Harriet The Spy. That’s who I’m thinking about this week. It’s because I credit Harriet, the petulant lead character in a 1964 book by Louise Fitzhugh, with fueling my desire to become a novelist. If you haven’t read it, you must. But the reason I felt like Harriet this week is because she, an 11-year-old, […]

Procrastinating, er, Plotting

With For Sissy now available for readers, I’m now plotting my next book.  I should say “books,” because my next work will be a series — a mystery series. I’m a planner, not a pantser, so I outline. My outlines are never proscriptive, but I do rely on them to get me to the last […]

Cover Struggles of an Indy

After leaning that my video advertisement for For Sissy was too violent for Facebook, I made some quick changes so that the ad showed only the book cover, and not my embellishments of a bloody knife, et al.  In hindsight, I could see why FB wouldn’t want to show the implied violence of my original […]

Nice Ad. Could Use Some Toenail Polish.

I decided an ad in the Horror Writers Association newsletter might get some fresh eyeballs on The Crandall Haunting (not literally, unless you happen to have some eyeballs hanging around). So, I pulled out a couple copies of the paperback, piled them up this way and that and took a bunch of photos. From there, […]