During this past year, IRL (in real life) got crazy. There were highs, lows, many near misses, and a fair few crashes. Call me Phoenix – I’m still rising from the ashes. Luckily, I’m surrounded by those I love and who love me. Not everyone can put up with a Crazy Cat. When I did […]
Previously, I thought I had a way to portray dual timelines–vignettes. Now I know that they will work for some cases, but not for all. I have to use the best technique for story advancement. It may be a flashback. It may be one or more scenes. It could be a chapter. It could even be […]
I love creating stories with intelligent heroines–especially the ones for whom the television is simply their largest computer monitor. However, the backstory for the heroine in my new novel is giving me fits. How can I hide a crucial piece of her personal history from her? If it’s anywhere on the World Wide Web, […]
When writing my first book, I would hear others say that the second one is harder. I had to toss those words out of my brain because even the first draft of the first book was hard enough. I’ve recently started drafting the second book and I saw that those folks were right. I now […]
Artists – painters, sculptors, authors, poets, et al – express emotion with their work. Authors creating characters that show only one emotion is akin to painters rendering on the canvas in only one color, or at worst, only one hue of that color. Making lists of emotional attributes works for some authors; interviewing them works […]
My new work in progress (wip) is on a hit list. In the story, the heroine chases and pins down especially slippery pieces of information. I know who the assassins are – search engines. They have become so ubiquitous that the name of one of them is now the verb for using them all (“Google […]
Hmmm… I’m having a hard time choosing the fate of a particular character. It isn’t that I’m overly fond of him; it’s just that I’m unsure which scenario best suits the story. If I murder him, then the heroine is left with an item she’s never seen before and a quest to unlock the mystery. […]
After struggling with the structure for my new book, I gave up. Yep – I did. Me, the incurable optimist. I waved the white flag, threw in the towel, and then I red read. Lots. And I’m the better for it. I have learned that I was having so much trouble with this new novel because […]
There’s no other word for it. But after all, that’s what an antagonist is supposed to be. The one in my new novel certainly lives up to his label. Naturally, by the end of the book, he is to be found out and get his comeuppance. But so far, he isn’t cooperating. Taking him down isn’t supposed […]
