Rachel Brady The busiest time of my life was the winter of 2006. There was my day job in the research lab at NASA. I taught three fitness classes each week in the evenings. I was on a home-cooking kick and spent inordinate amounts of time making up advance menus and shopping lists each week, […]
Sometimes you meet an author that just makes you scratch your head and go, “Huh. Glad she thinks she’s all that, because her attitude and people skills sure leave a lot to be desired.” Then you meet an author who is the complete opposite. She’s friendly, gracious, enthusiastic, approachable, and seems to *get* that writing […]
On another blog I participate on, the question was about the author’s looks and went on to whether or not people judged the book by the author’s photo on the book. The gals on this blog are not only much younger than I am but definitely much better looking, I hope no one holds that […]
The press is on fire about a new book. Your friends are falling all over themselves telling you that it’s a “must read.” So you dutifully pick up a copy and no matter how hard you try, you just don’t get it. You can barely get past the first ten pages, let alone finish the […]
Top Writing Tips from Memoirist Theo Pauline Nestor I’ve been writing about myself or wanting to write about myself since before I can remember. When I finally got into a creative writing program in my 30s, there was no “Creative Nonfiction” track or even a class on memoir writing, so I wrote highly autobiographical stories […]
Noir and hard-boiled fiction seem to be in Jeri Westerson’s blood. She was born and bred on the mean streets of Los Angeles. Reporter, would-be actress, graphic artist; these are the things she spent her time on before creating the newest hardboiled detective, Crispin Guest—ex-knight turned PI, solving crimes on the mean streets of fourteenth […]
I’ve never had much feeling one way or the other about automobiles except that I want them to start when I get in them and I’ll get to wherever I need to go. When I was a kid growing up we always had a Chevrolet–I remember a Chevy coupe, then a larger Chevy sedan, but […]
This coming weekend I’ll be participating in the Chisholm Trail Book Festival in Duncan, Oklahoma. I’ll attend an author dinner on Friday night and then on Saturday I will present an hour-long workshop entitled “Clues to Writing a Mystery.” That afternoon, I’m doing a 20-minute reading from Murder Off the Books by Evelyn David. Guess […]
The topic we picked to dish about this month on our Soapbox couldn’t come at a more timely moment. Not long after we selected it, Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine, and Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult spoke out on the unevenness of book reviews when it comes to fiction written by […]
A VERY PRIVATE GRAVEBook 1, The Monastery Murders by Donna Fletcher Crow Chapter 1Felicity flung her history book against the wall. She wasn’t studying for the priesthood to learn about ancient saints. She wanted to bring justice to this screwed-up world. Children were starving in Africa, war was ravaging the Middle East, women everywhere were […]