My ninth Alafair Tucker mystery, The Return of the Raven Mocker , was just released in paper and as an e-book on January 3. And yet I’m already working on book ten. When I first began writing the Alafair Tucker Mystery series, I had a story arc in mind that was going to carry through ten books. This is a wonderful idea, but as anyone who has ever written a long series knows, after a couple of books all your plans for a story arc have gone by the wayside. The reason this happened, at least to me, is that I seem to be writing about real people who have their own ideas about how things should be gone about, and once I put them into a situation, they react to it in ways I had never anticipated. So much for a ten-book arc. Besides, I really want readers to be able to pick up any book in the series and have a satisfying experience without having to know anything about what went before. This poses the million dollar question for the author of a long series: How do you keep it fresh? Ho...

A few years ago, I edited a manuscript that had characters from all over the world – different worlds, in fact. Each spoke in his own particular slang and it didn’t take long for my eyes to cross. The plot held a grandmother from the Deep South, teenagers, foreigners, biblical characters, fantasy characters, and even talking animals. None had distinct, strong voices, even though the author had tried to convey speech patterns in the dialogue. Perhaps from trying too hard, the writing was terribly difficult to read, even for an adult. A youngster wouldn’t have gotten through ten pages without giving up. What went wrong in this scenario? Most importantly, the writer had not created a strong and simple vocabulary for each character. Most of the time, less is more when it comes to writing vernacular. For example, if one character uses the regional “y’all” for “you all”, stick to that. Don’t throw in y’ar and ye and youse. It’s especially important if your biblical characters are using “y...