As a child, I almost always read series books rather than stand-alones. Nancy Drew. Beverly Gray. The Hardy Boys. The Dana Girls. Nancy Drew and Beverly Gray stood out as my favorites. During my pre-teen and early teen years, I preferred the Beverly Gray books because they seemed to the young me to be better written. The fact they were all written by the same author (Clair Blank) may have contributed to that preference. They may also contribute to my ongoing interest in series writing — albeit several decades later. A few months ago, I decided to turn my two completed novels into a series by introducing a new protagonist in Book 1 and adding her to Book 2 and beyond. It sounded like a great idea (to me at least), and I loved the developing character. However, working her seamlessly into Book 1 proved far more challenging than I anticipated.  The time involved added another dimension of difficulty. I need to have a second book ready to go out the door to my layout and marketing guy ...

As a reader I have always enjoyed mystery series. That started with the Grand Dame of mystery Agatha Christie with her delightful characters Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Then it was John D. McDonald and the Travis McGee series. A few years later I stumbled upon the 87th Precinct Series by Ed McBain, the alter-ego of Evan Hunter, and that's what stirred my interest in police procedural mysteries. There are so many other series that I've enjoyed. Sue Grafton's alphabet series with Kinsey Millhone. Dennis Lehane's series with Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, a much too short series for me. Louise Penney' s series with Armand Gamache and a whole cast of intriguing characters. Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series set in Bangkok that recently ended, much to the dismay of this reader and many others. For a reader, when a series ends, it's like we've lost a whole family. That's especially true if there've been a lot of books, or even just...

There have been several excellent posts here this month about costumes and dressing our characters, so I thought I would take a bit of a divergent path with my post today.  Have you ever stopped to think that life is so much like the bag of Halloween candy that we used to get when we went out trick-or-treating? The bag would fill up with all kinds of unknown things as we dashed through the darkness going from house to house shouting, "Trick or treat." The air was filled with electric excitement as we anticipated enjoying all the goodies that were filling our bags. Then sometimes as we walked along the sidewalk, we'd reach into the bag and pluck something out, not really knowing what we were going to get. Maybe it would be something really scrumptious, like our favorite candy bar. Or maybe it would be just a simple piece of peppermint wrapped in plastic. Or the dreaded apple. Life is like that. Often we reach into each day and we don't know what we'r...