Posts Tagged ‘“Secrets She Left Behind”’
Hook, Line and Linker
During my twenty-eight years of writing, I’ve heard plenty of advice from other authors. One tidbit stands out: tighten the relationship between characters. I know exactly where (in Albert Zuckerman’s Writing the Blockbuster Novel) and when (1995, as I wrote Reflection) I read this suggestion. It’s stayed with me all these years and I draw…
Read MoreOn the Road Again
Just a quick post tonight, since I’m traveling. We’re staying at a B and B in a cute little town in New Jersey. This is a trip for pleasure as opposed to work, although I did bring my manuscript with me and am working on revisions during the down time– plus I’ll be breakfasting with…
Read MoreMy Characters are Party Animals!
Wow, was I young. I was looking through the scrapbook I kept during the early years of my career and found this old article from a Richmond, Virginia newspaper. For the first several years of my writing career, I maintained my private practice as a clinical social worker. It was so hard to make the choice…
Read MoreHow a Jersey Girl Became a Southern Writer
I was recently invited to write a guest post for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance blog, and I wrote about my transition from Jersey Girl to Southern Writer. You can read the post here , and I offer it with apologies to everyone in New Jersey, especially my family, my friends and my agent. You…
Read MoreRevising on the Porch
A few readers have asked me what’s happening with my work-in-progress, The Lies We Told, due to be published next June, so I’m here with an update. I’ve shared with you the synopsis process, the outline process, the writing process, the revising process and the torturous rush-to-deadline process. That was followed by two weeks of…
Read MoreTo Write or Not to Write? Controversial Topics in Fiction
I belong to Novelists, Inc, and we’ve been having an interesting discussion on our email loop recently. A member asked about the pros and cons of addressing controversial topics in our fiction. As you can imagine, the comments of the authors have varied just as much as their opinions on the topics themselves. I am…
Read MoreThe Schizophrenic Life of a Techno-Reader
My reading life is out of control. With the advent of ebooks, I worried that authors would lose income because they make less on an ebook than they do on a “paper” book, but if most readers are anything like me, authors have nothing to worry about. Take for example, the book I’m reading right…
Read MoreThe Great Blog Experiment
My webmaster has changed my blog to a WordPress blog, so I have a bit of a learning curve going on here! Let’s see how it works out. For those of you who comment frequently, let me know if you run into any snags. I hope not. Change is always a challenge, but I hope…
Read MoreThe Joy and Sorrow of Reader Reviews
Let me say one thing right up front: I think it’s wonderful that there are so many opportunities on the Internet for readers to review novels they’ve read. I absolutely love being able to check out what other readers think about a book I want to buy. If most of the reviews of a certain book are glowing,…
Read MoreUnexpected Gifts
Sometimes you find the prize when you’re not looking for it. John and I were traveling the backroads of eastern North Carolina recently as I researched the setting for my work-in-progress, The Lies We Told. We stopped for an ice cream cone at an out-of-the-way restaurant, and we sat on the restaurant’s tiny porch, licking our yummy…
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