This post first ran on April 25, 2013. Today I'm talking about critique groups, specifically the sort where work is presented in small bites rather than having someone evaluate an entire manuscript. The ideal critique group has people who write as well or better than you do, and understand your genre. Members should agree to a schedule for submitting and giving feedback. They should be willing to accept the positive and the negative, and understand that if several people have problems with an aspect of the work, it deserves rethinking no matter how good you think it is. Critique groups can be Face to Face, or they can be done online. I've done both, although now I'm with a small (3 member) online group. Face to Face gives you a chance to discuss critiques in more depth. One of my constant questions as a beginner was, "Am I writing it wrong, or are you reading it wrong?" because I thought I knew what I meant to say, and needed to know where I'd gone wron...

Newsletters seem to be gaining popularity as a marketing tool for authors , as well as musicians and other artists. I have subscribed to a few newsletters from authors that I enjoy such as Lee Child, Harlan Coben , Craig Johnson , and  Libby Fischer Hellman . I would probably subscribe to the newsletters of all of the authors whose books I read regularly, but I hardly have time for the books, let alone read all the newsletters that would appear in my mailbox. What I like about most about the newsletters I have subscribed to, is that they are brief and they usually include something personal from the author, so I get to know them beyond just the books they write. It's almost as good as meeting them in person. Being somewhat reluctant to add one more thing to my list of things to do that take me away from working on my latest book, I didn't start my own newsletter until last fall. When doing some reading about the pros and cons of newsletters, I picked up some good ...

Although I write romantic suspense, I'm not happy with the moniker the industry gave to the genre. According to the publishing industry, romantic suspense includes all romance-themed mystery sub-genres, from cozy to thriller. There's the added hero/heroine story arc, with its requisite Happily Ever After. However, by tacking that 'suspense' term onto the genre, readers might be expecting an actual suspense, not a mystery, and be disappointed. Mystery isn't the same as suspense. I happen to think I write romantic mysteries, or, as I prefer to call them, "Mysteries with Relationships." According to the dictionary, suspense is a state of uncertainty, enjoyable tension, or anxiety. A mystery is something you cannot explain, or don't know anything about. It's easy to see how the two overlap. Often the major difference in writing a mystery as opposed to a suspense will boil down to Point of View. If there's a villain's POV, then the reade...

With this month's theme being promotion, instead of promoting my own newest release (because I've already hyped Deadly Production in my last post ), I thought I'd give a plug to my author group, Booklover's Bench. BSP—Blatant Self Promotion—gets old in a hurry. If all anyone ever sees from you is Buy My Book , you'll lose them in a hurry. And, quite frankly, especially if you're an indie author, a great deal of your time—time that could be spent writing—has to be devoted to marketing. If not your time, then you'd have to hire someone, which costs money. A couple years ago, at the Novelists, Inc. (NINC) conference, a group of established authors presented a panel on their "Lifeboat Team." Ten of them banded together to share marketing efforts, including social media time. During my usual conference recaps, I reported on this panel, and had several authors asking if I wanted to form a similar team. We were not the NYT best-selling authors the...

One question authors are asked frequently is “Where do you get your ideas?” I don’t know about other authors, but I have an idea tree at the edge of my yard, and when I’m ready to start a new book, I just go out and pluck one from the branches. But sometimes, the tree’s not in fruit-bearing season, so I have to look elsewhere. Sometimes the ideas for books come when you’re looking for something else. When I was embarking on the journey to write Dangerous Connections , book 5 in my Blackthorne, Inc. series , all I wanted was a place to set what my daughter calls my “MacGyver Opening Gambits.” I thought my covert ops team might be dealing with the Mexican drug cartels, so I was searching for a setting in Mexico. I ran across an article about how American engineers were being kidnapped to build cell phone networks so the cartels could communicate privately, and wham! The story took a whole new direction. For my Mapleton Mystery series , which is set in a small town, I have to deal w...

Among other things, today is "National Memo Day." A memo, or in its original, longer form, memorandum , is defined as "a short note designating something to be remembered, especially something to be done or acted upon in the future; reminder ." As a non-plotter, it's important to keep track of ideas, clues, story reveals, character development and all the myriad details that keep those dreaded plot holes and continuity errors at bay. Some writers use lengthy outlines, some jot notes on legal pads, some use voice recordings (I know one author who dictates all his novels while hiking), some keep a separate document file, or use a program like Scrivener to help them keep track of their stories. I use a foam core board and sticky notes, and it's as close as I can get to plotting. There's no particular ordering of my notes. If I place a clue in chapter 6, I'll note it on my board. Then, when it's dealt with, I can toss the note. As the bo...

My editor recently returned her edits for Deadly Production, my next Mapleton mystery. It's the fourth book in the series, and she said this was the cleanest manuscript of all the books she'd edited for me. But, she did have one overall comment. She said, "It reads like a sequel." Of course, we both know it is, but she suggested more details, both about Mapleton and the locals. Before I plunged in and added details, I needed to look at the first three books to make sure I wasn't changing things around. Putting the mayor's office on the wrong floor, or moving other buildings, for example. Or taking a tall, skinny character and making him short and fat, or white when he was African American in another book. You know what I found? Very little. Most of my character descriptions throughout the entire series were painted with very broad brush strokes. A few words here and there, but I never stopped to give a full-blown description. Ozzie is the cook at Dail...

Woodland Park Library, Teller County, CO This is National Library Week. Do you love libraries? I know I do. When I was a child, my parents told everyone we had to move because I'd finished the local library. Okay, so maybe only the children's section, but I was an avid reader and loved our trips to the John C. Fremont Library in Los Angeles. We were allowed to check out ten books, and it was all I could do to carry them. Sadly, our new home wasn't as close to a library, and I was busy with school—but the school did have a library, and in junior high I chose "library service" as one of my electives. I got to spend an hour a day surrounded by books. Years later, we moved to Florida, and I instilled the library habit in my kids. I can still remember how they'd arrive home with their piles of books and say they'd already finished some of them. And yes, they were little, and the books were mostly pictures, but all of my kids seemed to emerge from the wo...

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...

Photo from the archive of American Television According to the calendar I was given, today is "Let's Laugh Day." I guess that means I'm supposed to either write something funny or talk about writing funny. The former would be a post that sucks more than a vacuum cleaner. I'm not sure I can do the latter a whole lot of justice, either, but I'm game. While I do have a sense of humor, I don't/can't write comedy. Sure, my characters joke around a bit, and I hope my readers get a smile or two, but to bill my books as humorous fiction would end up in more 1 star reviews than [insert metaphor here.] Writing humor is one of the places where using metaphors, clichés, and the like becomes an asset rather than a liability. Comparisons can work to your advantage. I saw this quote the other day: "Game of Thrones is a lot like Twitter. There are 140 characters and terrible things are always happening." Even though I've never watched Game o...

As a writer of romance, the ideal "hero" is something I deal with constantly. Brave, strong, good-looking, right? Not necessarily. I first saw a reference to the following article in Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels , by Sarah Wendell. An article in the Boston Globe in October 2009 by oncologist Robin Schoenthaler stated "the ideal man … is the man who will hold your purse in the cancer clinic:” Dr. Schoenthaler wrote: I became acquainted with what I’ve come to call great ‘purse partners’ at a cancer clinic in Waltham. Every day these husbands drove their wives in for their radiation treatments, and every day these couples sat side by side in the waiting room, without much fuss and without much chitchat. Each wife, when her name was called, would stand, take a breath, and hand her purse over to her husband. Then she’d disappear into the recesses of the radiation room, leaving behind a stony-faced man holding what was typically a whit...

Nowadays, it's all about shortcuts. Short attention spans. Being able to do things in a click. Yet we also want ourselves visible everywhere. So, how do we make it easy for people to find us, and help spread the word that we're out there? I discovered a site that expands on the typical "tweet" button we're used to seeing on blogs. It's called " Click to Tweet " and it allows you to customize a tweet, include links, and make it easy for your readers to share information. It took some trial and error on my part, so I thought I'd share what I figured out. It's the customization feature that attracted me. The typical tweet buttons that come with sharing packages tweet the title of the blog. But what if you want more? A long blog title uses up characters, and a short one might not convey enough to tempt readers to give you that magic click. What if you want to pull something else from your post? That's where Click to Tweet might help. ...

Every year at this time, people resolve all kinds of things. I notice this at the exercise classes I attend. The first week in January, the rooms are packed. By March, things are pretty much back to the way they were the previous October. Most of these people have probably (I haven't surveyed them, so I can't be positive) decided they want to "lose weight" or "get in shape" and figure a workout at the gym, or a yoga class, or whatever they've chosen, is the way to go. Some may drop out because they're not a good fit for the exercise routine, which is certainly acceptable. The others probably drop out because they're not seeing the results they expected. But what were those expected results? Resolutions are lofty dreams. "I will make the NYT Best-Seller List." Or "I will make enough money writing to quit my day job." Or even, "I will finish three books this year." What people need to do is set goals. Around my h...

This post was first published her on May 18, 2011. When I began writing, my crit partners would often return my pages with passages labeled "R.U.E." Anyone who's undertaken writing has heard "Show, Don’t Tell"—probably more times than they've wanted. This isn't a hard and fast rule, because often telling is more efficient than showing, and done well, gets the point across. But too much telling, especially when it comes across as author intrusion, can put the brakes on the pace of your story, doing exactly the opposite of what the author intended. For example, "Mary laughed so hard, she was afraid she'd pulled a stomach muscle. Susie had just told the funniest joke Mary had ever heard."   The second sentence isn't needed; it's explaining something the reader would be able to figure out in context. The goal of any fiction writer is to get readers to care about the characters. We want there to be an emotional connection, so we...

Looking ahead to Thanksgiving in two more days, I have spent some time considering all that I have to be thankful for. First and foremost, is my family. I am blessed with terrific kids and grand-kids who have been so good to me in a most difficult year. So have all my brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews. What would we do without family? Next I would have to say I am most thankful for all the friends I have; those here in my small town as well as those in the larger arena that is the Internet and social media. Who would have thought that one person could have thousands of friends on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and Google+. It boggles the mind and thrills me to hear from readers who have enjoyed my books. I am also thankful for the advances in publishing that have opened so many doors for writers. When I started my writing career, back when dinosaurs typed on old Royal manual typewriters, there were few choices for places to submit a book, and most of th...