If you’re a writer, you only wish you could write this well. Some excerpts: According to the news, Kyle Rittenhouse, the man who fatally shot two protesters during the 2020 demonstrations in Kenosha and then became the right-wing’s favorite little armed grievance goblin and mascot for gun worship and “self-defense” cosplay, was hospitalized after a…
(Short Mystery Fiction Society can be found on Facebook)
“No plot survives first contact with the writing of any of my novels.” –Dana Stabenow (with apologies to Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder) At the moment I’m working on the second Harvey Girl novel, The Iron Trail. At the behest of my editor I wrote a six-page outline consisting of chapter numbers with…
A fascinating read, with something important to teach every writer, fiction or non. “You weren’t bitten by a dog,” one nurse told me. “You were mauled by one.” It took me months to recover, and that gave me time to think. I thought about my body, which hurt in ways I’d never felt—not just in worse ways,…
I love a good acknowledgements page at the back of a novel, where the author tells us where they got all their ideas. I try to write them for mine, too. Here’s the one I wrote for The Harvey Girl. It’s six pages long in the book, and it ain’t short here, either. I hope…
So a while ago at the Poisoned Pen I pinch hit as host for Barbara Peters, who was slugging back Singapore Slings in the bar at the Raffles Hotel in, you guessed it, Singapore at the time. We’re still not speaking to her. The guest du soir was Paula Lafferty, of the bestseller The Once…
I read S.J. Rozan’s most recent novel in January and reviewed it here, where I said, and I quote myself without shame: I do so love me an ending where maybe not everyone gets what they want but everyone who deserves it gets their due. A novel where you get a dozen plots for the…
[from The Heinlein Society‘s Facebook page] “I never “created” or “invented” a “Future History.” On April Fool’s Day 1939 I started to write commercially (appropriate date?); by the middle of August I had written 8 shorts & a serial. As 5 of these items were more or less to the same fictional background, I found…
The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books… The second is to write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration. –Octavia Butler
From Frank Bruni–“I’m revisiting especially fine passages of prose from the past 12 months.” You should click through to read them all but here’s a taste to get you going. In Golfweek, Eamon Lynch reflected on Trump’s grifting: “There was a time when it would have been scandalous for a sitting U.S. president to use the office…
