By Kathryn Lane My husband and I did not celebrate Valentine’s this year. Yet we made up for it the following night with a romantic, candlelight dinner. Not exactly to make up for Valentine’s but as a consequence of the deadly snowstorm that hit Texas. When our power failed, we started lighting candles. Donning a […]
By Kathryn Lane When I’m about to start writing a new Nikki Garcia mystery, I take time to look back, like traveling through a time capsule, to the origin of the genre. Most literary historians place the origin of mysteries in 1841 when Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He invented […]
By Kathryn Lane For people with an appetite for travel, 2021 promises to be a better year. We’re already picking destinations and building itineraries to fulfill our yearnings. Yeah, I’m one of those crazy, exuberant travelers anxiously waiting to renew my journeys! Before becoming a writer, I jetted around the globe for work purposes. I’d […]
“When pigs fly” is an adynaton, an absurd figure of speech to describe an action or event that will never happen. But in literature, there are several examples of pigs that take action or participate in events, and a few indeed fly. In real life in 2020, pigs are flying…on commercial airlines! A consequence of […]
Antique Underwood Typewriter and Calla Lilies Social media has swept instant and fleeting tidings over us – the expectation of continuous news snippets. I wondered how this impacts the work of authors. In doing research, I found an interesting quote from Donna Tartt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch: “There’s an expectation these […]
By Kathryn Lane Planning a research trip! Research is a must for scientists and academic writers who either “publish or perish”. And it’s also a necessary activity for people who pen non-fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction. But what about genre writers? To me, authenticity is important in novels. Without it, readers lose interest. Plot, characters, […]
By Kathryn Lane Just beyond the Santa Fe Opera, on the road to Los Alamos National Laboratories, is Camel Rock Monument. I traveled that route as a young CPA on my way to perform financial audits at the Labs. Camel Rock sits, almost Sphinx-like, guarding the southern fringe of the Española Badlands in New Mexico. Back […]
By Kathryn Lane When I give presentations on writing, I’m often asked if I’ve experienced writer’s block – a slowdown of creativity or the inability to create a new work. When my creativity slows, I turn to researching topics I’m writing about and that attracts my creative angels again. But I’ve heard stories of how […]
My husband, Bob, and I were enjoying our morning coffee recently when he looked out the window at the fence of live bamboo. I’d planted it to avoid looking into our neighbor’s living room. And of course, I’d placed containers in the ground to prevent the plant from spreading outward and conquering the world, as […]
By Kathryn Lane Writers are always combing through ideas for stories. We take in a lot of information and through our individual creative processes, we select the characters, plots, themes, and settings that we bring to life. Great authors, like Arthur Conan Doyle and Margaret Mitchell, invent characters, such as Sherlock Holmes and Scarlett O’Hara, […]