In Kelly J. Ford’s gripping Southern noir, Real Bad Things, Jane Mooney returns to her Arkansas hometown after a body that might be the abusive stepfather she confessed to murdering 25 years ago [...]
John Vercher’s debut, Three-Fifths, is a riveting crime story told with touches of poetry, razor-sharp characterizations, and the sort of cinematic pacing that keeps you on the edge of your seat. [...]
This review originally appeared in New York Journal of Books. “A Bend in the Stars is a thrilling read that sends a chilling message as to how history could repeat itself if we don’t heed [...]
YA Wednesday: NaNoWriMo for Young Writers, YA Must-Reads that Started as NaNoWriMo Projects, What Young Adults Want to Read, Outlining Without Biting Your Head Off
1 0
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is just around the corner and this could be your chance to finally get that novel, or at least 50,000 words of it, written. The result might be highly [...]
YA Wednesday: Write A Successful 1st Draft (Without Stabbing Yourself In The Eye With a Spork), The Greatest Lesson I Learned in Writing This Year, Tropes to Avoid, Diverse Books to Look Forward to in 2017
1 0
The New Years resolution at the top of my list is to finish The Black Sea, my novel in progress. And not just to finish it but to wrap it up in two to three months. Admittedly some of my [...]
When I set out to write a novel inspired by the case of Charles Schmid, the “Pied Piper of Tucson,” I knew from the start that I was not the only writer to find a story in this case.
It’s almost a rite of passage to have to change the title of your book when it sells to a publisher, and I fully expected that to happen to me. I figured it would be just one more step in a [...]
Writers think about word counts the way dieters think about calories. By the time I finished my YA novel, Half in Love with Death, I’d reduced it from 97,000 to 90,000 words, and I thought it was [...]
My daughter first sang in public when she was three years old. I can still see her in a dark-flowered dress, fearlessly belting out “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in a husky voice that someone [...]