Yesterday's Murder is a book I began a looooong time ago and never finished. I was writing series for two different publishers, and while I loved the idea of a woman waking from a long-term coma and finding her life was completely changed, I simply didn't have the time to give it the work it deserved. A year or so ago I stumbled on the file, read through it, and thought I'd like to work on it again. Of course, the world had changed a bunch since I started, so there was massive updating to be...
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Aunt Marge is women's fiction and suspense, with touches of Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne, Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, and other classic tales that are close to gothic in mood.
Grumpy people abound in literature, from Ove in A Man Called Ove to Minnie Jackson in The Help to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Why they are grumpy and how/if they overcome that is a gold mine of storytelling possibilities. Aunt Marge is a woman we often don't like. Putting Gwen, a vulnerable...
The Trouble with Dad again demonstrates my conviction that a series has an arc that rises and comes to a logical conclusion. The story that began with KIDNAP.org and continued in Pharma Con has come to a point where two things can happen: I can keep making up capers for Robin and her amateur hoods, or I can end the series. As you can probably guess, I chose the latter.
Our parents define us in many ways. Some serve as examples, and we strive to be like them. (I was lucky enough to have two...
Friendship is an important theme in women's fiction, and Deceiving Elvera focuses on one of those pairings that's accidental and unlikely but nevertheless firm and long-lasting. I've been lucky enough to have several of those in my lifetime, the kind that take up even after long stretches without contact. Whenever you meet, you're back to where you were at twelve or twenty or forty, sharing stories and enjoying the feeling of being with someone who "gets" you.
Writing a book requires different...
The second of the Kidnap Capers is Pharma Con. This one took a great deal of research, and I learned a lot about the medicine we are offered in this country. Since I wrote the book, it's become a bigger and bigger issue, and our current HHS secretary has some interesting ideas that seem to come from nowhere. I don't even want to be a health care expert, but if I had to fix things I'd be every bit as qualified to do so as RFK is, and I would not take the path he's taking.
That said, medicine is...
Some books have to be chalked up as disappointments, and FAKE is one of them. I love the story, love the ways the characters' telling of their views lead the reader into an understanding of both their crimes and their motivations. Those who have read it seemed to like it too, since the reviews are positive. One person commented on the "great" cover, the wolf in sheep's clothing that represents the main character, Kip. But nothing much happened with sales.
When I'm being philosophical, I can...
My history of my writing is getting closer to modern times now, and my interest has turned to women's fiction. Pretty much all of my life, I'd had a story in the back of my mind of sisters who love but don't understand each other. This is real life, and I've always been fascinated by how siblings relate to each other. We share more with them than with any other humans: genetics, timeline, proximity, and experiences. Yet as adults we often fail to understand each other in the most basic ways.
...
Now is the time to tell of a couple of mistakes I made. I wrote a caper novel, a humorous telling of crime and mayhem. I loved the characters and what they were able to accomplish by fighting crime with crime. I titled it KIDNAP.org.
That was a mistake. Do you know what a computer does with a title like that? I do now. A search for it takes you to sites for human trafficking, not to fun little books about righteous rascals. I suppose I could do something about it, like change the title, but...
The Loser Mystery series, like my others, has a definite character arc. Loser begins with significant issues in Killing Silence and works through them a bit in Book 2, Killing Memories. In Book 3, Killing Despair, we learn how her suffering came about and who caused it.
While Loser isn't completely healed at the end of this entry, we can see that she is making progress. She may someday be fully back to being Beth, able to leave her Loser persona in the alleys of Richmond.
My publisher wanted...
The last book of the Dead Detective series is one of my favorites, because it ties up all Seamus' qualities, good and bad, in a compelling story. When she finished it, one reader wrote to thank me for bringing the series to what she called a "satisfying end."
For me, a series needs an arc. The main character should change in some way, starting in one place and ending somewhere else. If Seamus makes a change, it's going to be a big one, so the story has to support that.
Some really popular...
Sometimes a book needs a little nudge. I wrote Shakespeare's Blood early on in my career, intending it to be a three-book series, but the idea got lost in stuff I wanted to write and stuff my contracts said I would write. Then a friend/reader said one day, "I like Shakespeare's Blood best of all your books. There should be another one, so we know what happened to Mercedes after she lived through Book #1."
That reminded me of my original intention, so I started Charlie Dickens' Documents. Both...
Her Majesty's Mischief finishes the Simon & Elizabeth Mysteries. I thought about doing a fifth book with Simon meeting William Shakespeare, but the plot never gelled in my head. Besides, we'd taken Elizabeth from princess to queen and I had other ideas I wanted to work on. Historical books require a lot of research, and you'll still probably get some bit wrong. There is always a reader who's only too happy to point out mistakes. Here are a few examples.
In the first book, I said that a...
I made the point earlier that series have good and not-so-good aspects for writers. One negative is the fact that readers don't always read the books in order. Killing Memories and the last book of the series are the only books of mine that should NOT be read out of order. In this 3-book series, the character arc is crucial to understanding Loser, so readers should start with Killing Silence.
A word here about character. When I released a book with a homeless protagonist, many loved it and...
The third Dead Detective book, Dead for the Show, changes setting from Michigan to Toronto, where Seamus investigates the death of a theater's costume designer.
By this time I was into the groove of writing a series, so I'll comment on the differences between series and stand-alone novels. Readers who like series grow attached to the main characters and wait for new books so they can find out what's happening in their lives (or in Seamus' case, their afterlives). Stand-alones have a different...
The third Simon & Elizabeth Mystery takes place in Elizabeth's darkest time. Mary I is on the throne, and Elizabeth will quite possibly be put to death for plotting treason. Mary is one of my least favorite people from that time, though I understand how she came to be as she was.
I feel compelled to say here that I dislike the practice of some authors of turning the people of the Tudor Age into what they were not. Some authors go too far to sell books, making a soap opera out of the lives...
My publisher for the Dead Detective series was small and very approachable, so when I got the idea for the Loser Mysteries, I went to them with it. They loved the first book, Killing Silence, claiming it would be my "breakout novel." A bookstore owner said the same thing once she read it, saying while she liked my other books, this was The One. The hoopla they predicted didn't happen, but it was nice of them to say it.
I know where this story came from. At the time, my daughter faced a bunch...
You might be thinking by now, "This woman has written a lot of books!" That's true, because I love it. Self-publishing is both a blessing and a curse to modern writing. It's a blessing for authors who are willing to do the work that publication requires. They can write and share their stories without the gatekeepers who once passed judgment on what would and would not be offered to the public.
At a conference once, I heard an agent explain that there were times when she had thirty excellent...
I mentioned earlier that I had two publishers for a while. One handled the Simon & Elizabeth Mysteries, while the other had taken a liking to the Dead Detective Mysteries.
This is a good time to mention that I never work on two books at once. I haven't got that kind of brain, so I focus on one until it reaches a "resting" stage, complete in a sense but perhaps not ready for sharing. I might write a rough draft and set it aside for a week or more. I might write a decent draft and as a beta...
An earlier post introduced my Tudor series, The Simon & Elizabeth Mysteries, and Poison, Your Grace is Book #2. Three of the four books were published by a traditional publisher that ceased to exist in 2023. I learned a lot from them about the business, particularly about the importance of editing and covers. Everyone there was kind and patient with me, though I sometimes chuckled at their suggestions. "We need you to get a blurb about your upcoming book from one of your author friends."
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Shakespeare's Blood comes from my years as an English teacher, and some of the crimes within that story might come from Shakespeare's admittedly bloody plots. It's the only one of my books that I would warn people not to read if they aren't into nasty murders. While I have no desire to write such things, when an idea comes along I write it down. It's only later that I think, "Ick. That was a gory one!"
I wrote the story when internet publishing was in its infancy and I was unaware of the...