I’ve kind of been in the mud the last few months, maybe longer, but reading the latest posts by my brilliant blog-mates told me that I wasn’t alone. It’s been a difficult time for so many. Wars, gun violence, the murder of children, homelessness, and political discord have filled the news and social media. We’d have to have a hard heart not to let it bother us. Most of us would say we are lucky to be in the situations we’re in and be grateful for that, but we grieve for those who aren’t.  For me, the respite has been visiting my grandkids, who are free from all the angst of the world’s problems, as children usually are. It’s a change of pace watching Booba on TV instead of news, though we’re careful not to let our anxieties rub off on the children. Kids growing up in today’s environment of conflict and hate-mongering must absorb some of it no matter how careful the adults try to keep their young minds on youthful projects. I grew up in a different time. Simpler, with a more unit...

I know the Blood Red Pencil blog is about writing, but TV scripts are written, so give me a little latitude here. Nowadays, some of the best suspense/thriller/mystery writing is coming out of TV scripts. My husband and I never streamed series TV until late last year, but because of the coronavirus, contentious political TV, and movies we’ve seen a dozen times, we decided to settle in for some serious watching. Here are a few of the great shows that hooked us. After I found out Blacklist (Netflix) wasn’t about the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), something that always fascinated me, I didn’t particularly want to watch it, but I like James Spader, so I thought it was worth a try. We loved it. Eight seasons, with 22 shows per season later, we can’t wait for season 9. If you like crime fiction and can overlook the stories’ impossibilities and suspend your disbelief, you’ll love this show. The skinny: Raymond (Red) Reddington, Spader, is #1 on the FBI’s wanted lis...

For everyone on the planet, 2018 marks a new year, a new beginning. For writers, it marks another year to produce a book for publication. I haven’t published a new novel since September of 2015. I reached 35,000 words on one, decided I didn’t believe the premise, and gave up, though I think it has future possibilities with a little more thought. I did write The Last Heist , a novella for the anthology, Lowcountry Crime , but that was it. Today, January 9 th , I'm publishing The Scent of Murder, the fourth book in the Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series, my ninth suspense novel, and my twelfth book overall, including erotic romance books written under a pseudonym.  When I published Backlash , the third book in the series, I thought it was the most difficult book I’d written, not because it was a hard book to write, but because I didn’t want the series to diminish in quality. We’ve all read reviews of books deep into a series that suggest the author should move on, t...

One of the difficulties in writing fiction is how to individualize your characters to make them real. This can be achieved through dialogue or specific character tics or mannerisms. Doing this in a series is more difficult because you have to keep the characters consistent in book after book. One of my favorite series—and I qualify this because I’m not a big series reader—is Michael Robotham’s Joe O’Loughlin series. Joe is a clinical psychologist with Parkinson’s Disease. Robotham doesn’t hit the reader over the head with the disintegrating effects of the illness on Joe’s body. Instead, throughout the series, the symptoms become more subtly noticeable: a disobedient leg that freezes in mid-gait or a hand tremor, but never does he make the character about the disease or the disease about the character. To coin one of my least favorite phrases, it is what it is. Joe goes about his business solving crimes without ever becoming a victim. I can think of two series where the character...

Getting to the end of the first draft of your book is a major accomplishment for any writer. Getting to the end of the first draft of Backlash , the third book in my Diana Racine Psychic Suspense series was flat-out torture. I’d never struggled to finish a book before. As a typical pantser—one who writes by the seat of her pants—I write a chapter at a time, with only a glimpse in my brain to where I’m going with the story, possibly two or three chapters ahead at most. So why was this book giving me so much trouble? Expectations. Both mine and my readers. Over the past year, people wrote to ask me when the next Diana Racine novel was coming out. OMG, people were waiting for it. Those readers had obviously liked the first two well enough to look forward to the third. I published the last one, Goddess of the Moon , in October of 2012. That was almost two years ago. I published one other standalone in between. Though the first book, Mind Games , wasn’t published until March of 2012...