November is always a month that stirs a lot of reflection on my part. Thanksgiving is such an important holiday in my family, and always has been since I was a kid when we'd drive from Michigan to West Virginia to celebrate with my father's extended family.  In all those years that my siblings and I rolled down snowy hillsides to become human snow-people, and went inside to vie for one of the drumsticks, I never thought of what my mother was doing that day while she was alone.  My parents divorced when I was five, so she never came on those yearly visits to my father's homeplace. So why am I sharing this here? This year I've been writing a memoir as a follow up to my novel, Evelyn Evolving , which is the story of my mother's life. That book ended when I was about five years old, and readers have asked, "what happened next?" so I thought my story would answer that question. What I didn't realize is how hard it is to write a memoir. There are so many ch...

Home to Thanksgiving. George Henry Durrie [Public domain] Published by Currier and Ives. Thanksgiving is upon us—the season for gratitude and overeating in the good old U.S. of A. So, while you are digesting pumpkin pie and partaking of spiced cider (or perhaps something stronger), why not curl up with a good book and nourish your mind and imagination? Here are some lists where you can find Thanksgiving-themed stories, from mysteries to children's books to romances and more…  Let's start with Murder & Mayhem , because, well, why not? They have a delicious list of seven mysteries to start off our feast .  Where would we be without a plethora of offerings from the Cozy Mystery List ? Probably starving!  Here is Mystery Fanfare with some additional tasty entrees in the mystery genre. Moving beyond mysteries, Goodreads will definitely provide you with plenty to chew on. Let's start with their " Listopia list of Listopia lists " for Thanksgiving-...

I’m Canadian, so I celebrated Thanksgiving last month. However, not everyone is Canadian. So, in honour of American Thanksgiving I’m sharing 10 things I’m grateful for each and every day. Bonus # 11. (Dare we say it?) No trolls to feed. Photo by Josh Wedin, via Flickr 10. The ability to weave a plot and create characters to walk its path. 9. Being able to lose myself in my fictional world. 8. Warm soup on a cold day. (Remembering to keep said soup out of the spill-zone.) 7. Fingerless gloves. (No, it doesn’t get that cold in my little corner of Canada, but it does get damp.) 6. The increasingly acceptable option of being in charge of my own destiny by self-publishing. 5. Getting away from the lights of the city and glorying in the wonder of the stars. 4. A purring cat. In my opinion, there are few sounds more comforting that the rumble of a cat’s purr. 3. Typing “The End.” 2. Having my characters talk to me. I might not like what they’re saying or the hour tha...

There are a lot of things I am especially thankful for this year. This great community of friends here at BRP is high on the list, as is my publisher, Five Star Cengage Gale and the staff there. My latest book with them, Stalking Season, came out the middle of this month, while I was out of town with limited Internet access. The acquisitions editor, Tiffany, had a special presentation featuring my book and four others that had received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, and I was not going to be able to promote that day, October 30th, as that was the day my sister was having surgery for breast cancer. Even though I try to keep personal information about my family and myself out of business correspondence, I did let Tiffany know why I would not be online to promote her event. She immediately sent me the nicest message, "Please don’t worry for a second about having to do anything on October 30th.  I’ll do all the promoting for you that day (and on the FS Facebook page afte...

Everyone should be just about ready for Thanksgiving by now. This month's themes at the Blood-Red Pencil are "Thanks" or "Promote a Favorite Author." I'm staring at them, wondering how to narrow either of them down to a 500-word blog post. Should I be thankful for books by favorite authors? Of course I am—I can't imagine a life without reading. Should I be thankful for the emails I get from readers telling me they love my books and want more? Of course I am, but that's a personal thing. I can't choose a favorite author, just as I can't choose my favorite child. So, I'll leave that part of the month's theme up to you. Any authors you want to introduce readers to? (Or, since this is a blog where the editing police might show up, maybe it should be, "Any authors to whom you want to introduce readers?") With Black Friday right around the corner, let others know what books you think they should be looking for. As f...

Hi, my name is Shon Bacon, and I'm addicted to writing. It's been about 29 years since I picked up a pen and thought, I think I would like to write stories for people to read. Since then, I have found it quite difficult to stop. I don't want to stop. I can't stop. My blood is the ink to which I write life stories. My writing courses through my veins. There have been several times when I tried to stop cold turkey, but I just couldn't. I could last a few days, even a week; one time, I lasted a whole month; however, words continued to churn in my brain and meld into sentences that grew into paragraphs that birthed stories. I will admit, wholeheartedly, that in the teen years of my writing addiction, my work sucked. I loved baseball and I loved love, so as I teenager, I wrote a lot of suck-ass screenplays about chicks who somehow became owners of baseball teams and fell in love with the star player. As I grew, my writing did, too, but not by leaps and boun...

The Thanksgiving holiday is a special time of year when we pause in our whirlwind lives to remember what we are grateful for. I do try to think of each day with gratitude, but sometimes we do get caught up in the hurried way we live our lives and we start to see only the negative things that happen. Sometimes the simplest things are what give me pause, bring me to tears: • A spectacular sunset • The full moon in a clear sky • A day of sunshine in the cloudy Pacific Northwest • My cat sleeping in my lap I consider myself lucky (maybe that’s the wrong word, maybe it’s the recipient of great gifts) for bigger things in my life too: • The parents who inspired me to be self-sufficient and independent • My close family, including my “in-laws” who I think of as sisters • The wonderful teachers who encouraged me to develop my interest in reading and writing • My dear husband who has supported my writing dreams without question And even though we have been going through a very r...

Thanksgiving is traditionally the time to gather with family and share good times. That works well when family is close, but not so well when they live 1,200 miles away. When we first moved to Texas, it wasn’t feasible for us to travel to Michigan when the kids just had a short break from school, and most of our relatives preferred to stay home. So it was always a treat when one of the Grandmas would join us for the holiday. It was nice to have someone with whom to share that special spirit of Thanksgiving, and the kids appreciated having a Grandma all to themselves. No other cousins around clamoring for attention. I appreciated having a Grandma all to myself, too. There's nothing like an extra hand in the kitchen to make one feel like she can conquer anything, including a twenty-five pound turkey. One year when Mom Miller came for the holiday, the kitchen sharing was a little awkward at first, due to the fact that we didn’t cook together very often. Once every three or four...

As we start the week heading toward Thanksgiving, it made me think about the time I got all philosophical and used my newspaper column to ask if we don’t use the Thanksgiving holiday as an unconscious excuse not to be thankful the other 364 days of the year. Or at least not be aware of all the things we have to be thankful for. So I decided to make a concentrated effort to search my soul and come up with something to be thankful for every day. Here is the list I made that year: I'm thankful for the cold weather that chills my bones and helps me to appreciate the heat of summer. (Next August you're free to remind me I said this.) I'm thankful for the puppy that comes in my office to chew on my toes and remind me there's more to life than just work. I'm thankful for mail delivery because I know it will draw me out of the house at least once a day.  I'm thankful for the kid who will bail me out and cook dinner when I'm working on a deadline, even though...

FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS This is the time of year we all count our blessings, and like you, I’m grateful for oh, about a hundred things!  But since this is a site about writing and editing, we’ll keep it to that. It’s funny; a decade ago, when my brother (a renowned psychiatrist) and I wrote our first book together, Five Keys for Understanding Men ,  we were in NYC promoting it via the network broadcast stations.  Gary looked at me and said, “This isn’t going to work for you as a career path—it’s too risky.” Now, I know my brother loves me, and has my best interests at heart. And from the outside looking in, it’s very difficult to dispute his reasoning. Publishing is the iffiest of businesses in the world. I could go into all of the depressing facts about getting a book published, actually making a living at it (and how few folks do so), and all of the other nightmares included herein. But what I’ve learned over the many, many years I’ve been involved in it, is that fa...

Holidays are a great opportunity to enrich your manuscript. The trick is not to just mention a holiday in passing, but to add vivid descriptions of how one is celebrated in your character's life. You can draw on this by your own experience. Think of a holiday, such as Thanksgiving. What's the weather like outside? That will depend on where you live and/or the climate vagaries of the fictional year you create. Who is invited to your character's house to celebrate the holiday? Who prepares the meal? The mother, the wife, the son, the daughter, one, some, or all? Who helps? How is the table set? That may depend on the station in life of your characters, whether they're well-off or perhaps just-married college students. What is on the menu? Does it reflect the main character's ethnicity, or perhaps some quirk? Many people eat turkey for Thanksgiving, but maybe your character is alone and eating spam. What about guilt? There are lots of possibilities for that, such as a ...