Q . What genre do you write? A . I write cross-genre fiction. Q . What’s that? A . That’s the genre that agents and editors tell you they can’t place on the bookshelf when they reject you. Bookstores can’t find a place for your book either. Q . So, do you write either mystery, suspense, or thrillers? A . Yes, all three, sometimes in one book, but there’s also romance. Q . Then it’s romantic suspense? A . Not really. Q . Why not? A . Because I don’t follow the romantic-suspense formula. Sometimes the romances in my books don’t have a HEA, Happy Ever After. Romance Writers of America classifies Romantic Suspense this way: The love story is the main focus of the novel, a suspense/mystery/thriller plot is blended with the love story, and the resolution of the romance is emotionally satisfying and optimistic. Though my books have a romance, crime is the focus of the story. RWA has tempered their former explanation of a definite HEA to an ending that is emotionally satisfying an...

Laura Caldwell is a lawyer-turned-author-turned-life-saver. She is a former civil trial lawyer, now a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She is also director of Life After Innocence, published author of 14 novels and one nonfiction book (to date), and speaker, daughter, sister, aunt, and friend. Caldwell’s fictional work began as chick-lit and soon turned into the mystery/thriller genre. Her first book,   Burning the Map , was voted as one of the year’s best books by BarnesandNoble.com in 2002. The Chicago Tribune called   A Clean Slate   “a page turner.”   The Year of Living Famously   and   The Night I Got Lucky   prompted Booklist to declare, “Caldwell is one of the most talented and inventive ... writers around.” In 2009, Caldwell released a trilogy on character Izzy McNeil, a Chicago lawyer who finds her way into a myriad of situations in which she must use her wit and legal skill. While researching her sixth novel, Cal...

We have developed forty conflict ideas and layered the first half of the story. Let’s finish the process. We left off at turning point 2. Now the hero must come up with the correct solution to the problem, the one he resisted at first: blow the meteor up. Internal Conflict 6 : Dick finds Sally packing her bags.      Dick says, "Don’t leave. I love you. I’ve always loved you."       She replies, "Then why are you ruining things?"             Should he tell? Is it better for her to know or not know that their days are numbered? Antagonist 7 : Dick confronts Ted.       "You had something to do with this."      "You’ll never prove it and in a few days it won’t matter anyway." External 7 : They are back to the drawing board - all seems lost. They enter countdown mode.  Internal Conflict 7 : Sally tells Dick that she received a call from Ted and that h...

Recently I returned from four days in New York City at the ThrillerFest conference, sponsored by the International Thriller Writers. While I don't think my books are thrillers in the true sense of the word, I've had them reviewed as such, and a lot of authors who don't write what I consider to be thrillers are members of the group and attend the conference, so I figured I'd give it a try. It's a very costly conference, and holding it in New York City adds even more to the price tag, but since I'd had some unexpected sales last year, I decided I ought to try it once. And, being able to take workshops from authors like John Sandford and Michael Connelly made it worth the price for me. So, what is a thriller? Years ago, when I looked up the definitions of mystery, suspense and thrillers, a mystery was defined as a story where the reader follows the detective as he solves the crime. The reader is one step behind the discovery, and can't know anything until ...

To kick off March, I'm happy to welcome thriller writer, LJ Sellers, a much-missed former member of the Blood-Red Pencil. She has a new book out in her popular thriller series - the best one yet! ~ Dani G. Complex plots keep readers guessing and turning the pages to see how it all fits. As much as readers like to be surprised, they don't want to be confused, and it's often a fine line between the two. As a crime fiction novelist, I've often used parallel plot structures to tell a complex story from multiple points of view, and sometimes even from different time periods. But readers rarely—if ever—complain about being confused by my stories. Maybe I've just been lucky so far, but I also stick to a few simple rules to keep everything straightforward and satisfying. Time and dateline: I label my chapter openings with the date and time. If a chapter/subplot jumps back to a different time period, I label it like this: Six months earlier. By doing that, I cat...

By Dani Greer, Chief Red Pencil When I first heard about Peg Brantley’s new novel, The Missings , I wanted to know the Gore Meter Rating. Most of you know my weak heart can’t handle much more than a good cozy mystery when it comes to spine-tingling reads. It turns out the first chapter was about as gory as it got. The thrill level was definitely alive and well in this fast-paced novel though. But what thrilled me most of all is something we don’t see all that often in a plot-driven read: great character development. All of us feel fear, but I recently read in Psychology Today that we are born with only a few, such as fear of falling and fear of starvation. That means humans have acquired a lot of other fears through learned behavior. Some of the most common ones include fear of insects; fear of water or fire; fear of public speaking; fear of rejection; fear of nuclear war; fear of success or failure. In The Missings , Brantley plays on common fears many of us ha...