I’ve spent most of my time during the pandemic getting my next book ready for publication. To be honest, the only thing different about this particular time of my life is my concentration isn’t worth a damn. I keep switching back and forth to the online newspapers to see what’s happening, putting my work on hold as I get lost in the confusion. I have managed to finish the book, though I’m still nitpicking it. When our brilliant webmistress, Elle Carter Neal, put my book, The Scent of Murder , up on the blog as a Friday Read, it got me thinking about how to describe our characters without really describing them in the usual way. Then, as I was listening to an audio in the car, another example caught my attention. That’s when I thought about how writers describe their characters. In many cases, a few words can tell the reader more than a full paragraph. Some writers like John Sandford, of the Lucas Davenport Prey series, describe what every character looks like and what he wears on the...

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...