From the New Yorker I saw this cartoon from the New Yorker and it reminded me of an underlying theme in so many of the panels I attended at the recent Left Coast Crime conference. LCC is more reader-oriented rather than craft-oriented, but even in the panels targeting readers, there were writing tips hidden amongst the panelists’ responses. One repeating theme was conflict. Without conflict, there’s no story, so creating conflict is obviously any author’s challenge. For example, the first panel I attended was called Couples Solving Crimes , and the second was Guns and Roses: Romantic Elements in Crime Fiction . In the first panel, the couples involved weren’t necessarily working as partners, which one might have expected in a mystery crime panel. Instead, they were often partners off the job, or had jobs that brought them together. But each panelist did mention that having dual protagonists, or a protagonist and a sidekick, was a way to increase the conflicts in the books. You ca...

L.J. Sellers , author of provocative mysteries and thrillers, kicks off the beginning of 2014 for us. Welcome back to the Blood-Red Pencil, L.J. When I sat down with my contact at the FBI to talk about a story in progress, I was expecting just a broad overview of how an eco-terrorist case would be handled. I soon learned that my agent-friend had been the lead on the investigation into the Eugene cell of the Earth Liberation Front, an eco-terrorist group that sabotaged and burned businesses across the northwest, doing millions of dollars in damage. One of the key components of the investigation was to send in an undercover agent to infiltrate the group, and a second strategy was to try and turn those connected to the core member into informants. After hearing how exciting that work had been for him, I knew I had to incorporate both tactics into my story,  Crimes of Memory (Jackson #8) . And so Agent Jamie Dallas was conceived. I had so much fun crafting her charac...