HoZ Marketing Manager Zoe sez I’m reaching out as I’d love to grab some author content from you for The Harvey Girl. We’d love to get a Q&A from you that will go live on the Bloomsbury website and we can promote on socials and in newsletters. So I hopped right on that and she gave gracious…
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction by Dana Stabenow (written for Writer’s Digest) 5. Never neglect setting.* It’s key to everything that follows. What does it look like, smell like, sound like, feel like? What effect does the setting have on the characters, and why? Once you figure out setting, you can figure out who…
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction by Dana Stabenow (written for Writer’s Digest) 4. Make your protagonist a hero, if not in his own eyes then in everyone else’s. A hero is better than you and me; that’s why they are heroes and why they deserve their own novel and you and I don’t. How?…
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction by Dana Stabenow (written for Writer’s Digest) 3. Put your protagonist at risk. Physically, mentally, emotionally, any or all. Liam Campbell jumped out of an airplane (on purpose), was nearly flattened by a herd of walrus, and has been shot at and missed far too many times. We won’t…
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction by Dana Stabenow (written for Writer’s Digest) 2. Love your creeps. Put the villain on display and do it early in the narrative. Get your reader invested in the character and then betray the hell out of both of them. Read the rest at Writer’s Digest here.
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction (written for Writer’s Digest) by Dana Stabenow I only wish I’d had this list when I began writing, but thirty-seven novels later I do have a few things figured out. I don’t follow all these rules slavishly. I say begin with the murder but…often I don’t. Every writer does…
7 Tips for Writing Crime Fiction by Dana Stabenow (written for Writer’s Digest) 6. Decide early on if you’re writing a series or a stand-alone.* Don’t introduce that great character only to kill him off at the end of the first book of a 22-book (and counting) series. Don’t ask me how I know. *Realize…
Read more 6. Decide early on if you’re writing a series or a stand-alone.*
A seven-foot Jayco popup camper perched unsteadily in the back of a Ford F250 truck is not the best of all possible beds for a six-foot-two-inch man. Even sleeping corner to corner, Liam’s feet still stuck over the edge, there was no toilet, no shower and no place to hang his clothes, in particular his…
Liam squinted at her through his one good eye. “You didn’t say Donohoe had somebody with him.” “He didn’t.” Liam sighed and shifted carefully in a tentative attempt to sit upright. His head didn’t fall off so he was more patient than he might have been. “Look, Prince, you’ve obviously discovered some new evidence that…
Read more His head didn’t fall off so he was more patient than he might have been.
The window was open and that damn raven was sitting on the branch of a mountain ash right outside the window, looking as if he had been carved from a single piece of the darkest obsidian. Liam didn’t really know anything about obsidian except that it was a rock of some kind that was black…