November is for giving thanks and sharing time with family and friends. Freedom from Want by Norman Rockwell It's also my birthday month, which means lots of fun and surprises. My husband has gift-giving down to a fine art! But there's one other thing I look forward to more than anything in November, and that's National Novel Writing Month. I've been participating for at least ten years, and 2015 gave me my first 50,000-word success story. I finished with flying colors. November seems the perfect month for me to focus and write, and every year, I get a little better at it. This year I'm blasting through three 100-page middle grade chapter books, part of a series of seven books I've been thinking about for several years. I can't wait to get started! How about you? Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? Let's connect over there. Or are you one of those enviable people who naturally writes every day and publishes several books a y...

If you're looking for a free horror read for the Halloween weekend you can't go wrong biting into a David Wellington blog novel. All of the following are complete novels available for free online (or you can support a talented author and buy a Kindle or paperback book - see the links below). If horror is not your thing, Wellington also writes Fantasy as David Chandler , and Science Fiction as D. Nolan Clark . Monster Island Monster Island is a well-plotted horror story, with memorable characters, excellent villains, and many juicy twists. Following an epidemic that has turned most humans into zombie-like walking dead, a UN weapons inspector is forced to return to New York to steal antiretroviral drugs - to trade for citizenship for himself and his daughter into the only semi-safe country remaining in the world: Somalia. Meanwhile a medical student decides to join the undead rather than be eaten - but he first takes steps to preserve his brain while he dies. Being i...

Looking ahead to Halloween, a holiday I love by the way, we're writing about fear on the Blood-Red Pencil all this month. This is a time we think about all the things that used to scare us on All-Hallows Eve - ghosts and goblins and witches and now zombies – as well as other things that grab us by the throat and hold us immobile. Jason wrote about his fear of being able to get back to writing after the birth of his child in a two-part series that began with Fear Beyond Words . An apt title for a topic to which those of us who juggled kids and words can relate. Will we ever have time to write again? However, that is not what I want to write about in this post today. A Facebook friend recently advised me to be cautious about what I post on social media that could be controversial, such as political issues, as it may not help my career to get in the middle of contentious debates. Not that I want to get in the middle of an ongoing rant, but I do like to speak my mind, and perhap...

We are pleased to welcome Candace Kearns Read to the Blood-Red Pencil team. Image by dryhead , via Flickr Like everyone, I have plenty of fears. At the top of the list are snakes, evil spirits, falling off cliffs, and… being honest. So, when I set out to write a memoir several years ago, I found it difficult to create a final product that was any good. Sure, I could draft chapters, but instead of conveying the intensity I wanted, many passages were stiff, clinical, awkward. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t quite relax on the page, and it showed. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was hiding my truth. I was afraid. Speaking – and writing - our truth is scary. We fear ridicule, judgment, the pure vulnerability of exposure. My memoir tells the story of my attempts to save my aging Hippie mother from drug addiction, and the journey I took towards saving myself instead. It felt risky to write this book, and risky to publish it. I was afraid that those who knew my mot...

Image by amboo who? , via Flickr I wrote my first book without fear because I had no expectations. I didn’t really think I’d finish writing a whole book, let alone sell it. When Warner Books bought it, the fear began. First, I was afraid my editor would forget me before I’d written a second. That proved an unnecessary worry: By the time I finished Angel , she still remembered me; however, Warner had stopped publishing Regencies. So the next fear was that I’d never find another editor/publisher who liked my work. I did, obviously, or I wouldn’t be here. So let’s move on to the next stage. After several books, my editors no longer expected to receive an entire manuscript. They began to give me contracts on the basis of a synopsis of 7 pages or so. At that point, the quivering question becomes what on earth made me think I could turn this bare idea, which seemed so promising at the time, into an entire novel. And how can I turn these names into real, engaging people? I’ve ne...

Some years ago, I attended a writing seminar where the keynote speaker stated that our words are not our babies. After long and thoughtful consideration, I beg to differ. Our words may, indeed, be our babies in a number of ways. We nurture them in our hearts, sometimes for nine months, sometimes longer. Giving birth—getting them down on paper or a hard drive—can be an easy delivery or a painful process. Words, scenes, and chapters may roll from our minds through our fingers with little effort, figments of our imaginations’ creative processes, or emerge from difficult experiences of family, friends, or selves. Pent-up emotions may surface unbidden, sending hot tears cascading down our cheeks as we relive painful, perhaps suppressed events and transfer them to our protagonist or another character. Bottom line: our words often come from deep within, and their birth in written form may remain attached by a literary umbilical cord that refuses to be cut. What’s the result of this ong...

Writing novels can be a scary thing. Different elements affect our production, and that can turn into writer’s block. (Blog: How to Jumpstart Your Imagination ) There have been days in the past when I didn’t feel like writing, or maybe I was sick and wanted to watch a movie or read a book. Other days, when I’d written to a certain point in the story and didn’t know where to go, I’d take a short break. But I'd always get back to my story and finish it. I've done that eleven times for eleven books. That all changed this summer when I had knee replacement surgery. I know major surgery, and knee replacement is major, can change the chemistry of our bodies, but in my case it also changed how my mind worked. Everything revolved around my knee. Period. Not only have I been apathetic about writing, I’ve felt the same way about food, about getting dressed, and when I finally could drive, about going to the grocery store. In the past, I’ve always managed to get back on track after...

With shortened days, colder nights, falling leaves, and the approach of Halloween, it is time to crank up the horror genre. It just isn't October without a few good scares. I prefer psychological terror over grotesque or gore because it is what happens before the "Boo" that makes the "gotcha" delicious, but here are a few of my favorite classic horror reads: 1) Everything by Edgar Allen Poe. From the Tell-Tale Heart to the Cask of Amontillado , his stories have stuck with me over the decades. I still listen for the thump of a heart under the floorboards. 2) Stephen King, pick a title: Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Cell . They’re all chill-icious. His books have caused me several sleepless nights and a few near heart attacks. 3) The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson was a fantastical, terrifying ghost story about a group of people drawn to Hill House for a psychological experiment that goes awry when it seems the house has possessed one ...

Okay, so, maybe I don’t have what it takes to be a good daddy and an author. See, fear has a lot of power. It can be blinding, crippling, even fatal. People become completely paralyzed at the sight of a tiny spider. Grown adults are reduced to tears at the sound of thunder. People who taken their own lives because of voices whispering to them in the darkness. As someone who writes thrillers and horror, I am fascinated by the lengths people will go to avoid what frightens them. The human mind’s ability to be manipulated is something I love to take advantage of in my writing. But, obviously, I am not immune. I once considered myself, for the most part, fearless. I don’t really have a phobia. I despise needles, but as long as I don’t see them, I can avoid throwing nurses out of hospital windows. Sometimes I feel like I am suffocating if in too tight of a space. Perhaps I am mildly claustrophobic, but come on, either you have it or you don’t, right? I’ve jumped out of plan...

October. The weather cools, and the air turns crisp. Leaves change color and paint the Colorado mountainsides gold. Pumpkin patches swarm with excited children. We get out the grease paint, fake blood, faux tombstones, and laughing skeletons to celebrate all things scary and openly welcome fear into our lives. (Depending on the ticket price for our favorite haunted house, we sometimes pay big bucks to scream and pee down our legs.)   Fear, however, is all too real. We have fun with it for a few weeks but, when October ends, our true fears stay with us just like that twenty-pound sack of Trick-or-Treat candy on top of the fridge. Fear is necessary. It motivates us, strengthens us, helps us face life’s darker moments and keep moving. Fear exists in almost every aspect of our lives, whether we realize it or not. What trembles your knees? Spiders, clowns, needles, large crowds, tight spaces, in-laws, no wifi, life without Starbucks? Over the course of this month, all of us here...

I was lucky enough to snag an ARC of Timothy Hallinan's most recent release, Fields Where They Lay , a new Junior Bender mystery. Tim has been nominated for the Edgar and Macavity Awards, and Herbie's Game won the Lefty in 2014 for  the best comic mystery. As a long-time fan of Tim's writing, I was thrilled to get the advance copy of this book that releases in October. I first got acquainted with his work when I was reviewing for BloggerNews.com and received a copy of Breathing Water, a Poke Rafferty Thriller . That was back in 2010, and I have read a number of other books in the Poke Rafferty series, as well as the Junior Bender series. It's hard to say which I like better, as they both are so well-written and packed with fascinating characters and interesting places. Junior Bender is not your ordinary thief. He's a cultured thief, if cultured and thief could actually be used in the same sentence, but as you get to know him, you recognize that he is wel...

Earlier this month, Diana Hurwitz posted a great article entitled " Do You Need an Editor? " Supporting her contention that all writers do, she wrote, “Errors are speed bumps that affect the reader’s enjoyment of the ride you are taking them on.” She's absolutely right. Aren't editors expensive? They can be. See the industry standard prices posted at The Editorial Freelancers Association ? Sadly, though, big bucks don’t guarantee excellent editing. How do you find a good editor—the right one for your project? Ask fellow writers who they used. Were they satisfied with the result? Get recommendations at bookstores. Request references from any editor you are considering; the good ones shouldn’t object. Read a book or two they’ve edited. Are the characters lifelike, three-dimensional people? Does the story move smoothly forward? Whose POV is it told in? Do you always know who’s talking? Is the action realistic? Does the ending satisfy you, or does it leave you han...

A Black Sail by Rich Zahradnik is book three of a mystery series featuring newsman Coleridge Taylor, set on the mean streets of Manhattan and surrounding boroughs in the ’70s. It is a new release from Camel Press and is available in print, e-book and audio. On the eve of the U.S. Bicentennial, Taylor is covering Operation Sail, and  New York Harbor is teeming with tall ships from all over the world. While enjoying the spectacle, Taylor is still a police reporter. He wants to cover real stories, not fluff, and gritty New York City still has plenty of those in July of 1976. One surfaces right in front of him when a housewife is fished out of the harbor wearing bricks of heroin, inferior stuff users have been rejecting for China White, peddled by the Chinatown gangs. Convinced he’s stumbled upon a drug war between the Italian Mafia and a Chinese tong, Taylor uses every spare minute to investigate. This story resonated with me on several levels. First off, it is a terrific myster...

Noah Lukeman started as an editor for a major publishing company before becoming a literary agent. He is often a guest speaker on topics related to writing and publishing. The Plot Thickens and The First Five Pages are my favourites of his writing craft and editing books. Working through The Plot Thickens  is most valuable after fully completing a first draft, because we learn best from our own mistakes, and those going for the second round will have many lightbulb moments ahead of the revision or rewrite.  The Plot Thickens starts by re-developing the characters in your work and how the character changes through the book. Lukeman provides hundreds of questions to consider across every facet of a character. Not every question or topic will apply to every character, but his prompts are bound to help you develop extra information about your character that you can use in your work. As you work through the questions, take each insight back to the plot of your bo...

One hundred percent yes! In the olden days, when traditional publishers had a crew of talented editors aboard their ships, a writer had someone to suggest changes and to perform the final proof-reading. Nowadays, editors are being tossed overboard. If your book is traditionally published, your manuscript should get at least a cursory once-over if not three. However, being published by a big house is not a guarantee that your book will be solid or error-free anymore. Self-publishing means you must either: be a good editor, know and bribe a good editor, or hire one. Hiring an editor is tricky. Anyone with a fair grasp of English can hang out their shingle as an editor. If you decide to hire one, check their credentials. Ask for references. Do a criminal background check, just kidding, but only slightly. Search for them on the Preditors & Editors website: http://pred-ed.com. I highly recommend you have several people with some knowledge of craft go over your work. I'm no...

And the winner of the book drawing with swag bag is JuniperEve, whose son Toby will love Toby! Please look for an email from hotbuttonpress in your mailbox. Hazel Mitchell and I first met on Facebook a few years ago. I was immediately taken by her award-winning children's book illustrations. Even more fun were the engaging stories of her real-life rescue poodle, Toby. I wasn't much of a dog person at the time, but like all of Toby's many fans, my heart stopped when Hazel shared the news that Toby was lost , from a kennel caring for him while his people went on a vacation. For eight long and agonizing days, we all threw our collective virtual attention and love behind his rescue. You can read more about Toby's adventure here. Miraculously, Toby was found. But that was just the beginning of his story. This month, Candlewick Press releases the picture book inspired by him, Hazel's first published story-writing effort to go along with the charming illustra...