Merry Christmas to all who celebrate and a Happy 2011 to all! Taking the lead from many of the blogs I follow in my Google Reader, I’m taking a week off from blogging [...]

Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past week.  The list will be a little shorter this week because I’m going on tweetcation (most bloggers seem to be taking [...]

The practicing is really the thing that made me grow the fastest as a writer.  Everything else I was doing (reading books, craft books, blogs, industry news) was definitely helpful, but the one [...]

Once I decided that I wanted to write for a larger audience than just myself, I made a goal to improve my writing skills. The nice thing is that now there are so [...]

The beginning of the new year is always the time when I start assessing my writing goals for the year. It’s the perfect time to do it, since resolutions are on everyone’s brain [...]

I’ve always thought that books made the best gifts. I think I can remember every book I’ve ever gotten as a gift. And I’ve got a lousy memory. But it always struck me [...]

Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past week. If you’re looking for a particular topic, just plug in your keyword into the search box at the top left-hand [...]

Margot Kinberg had a nice post yesterday on character traits that are off-putting to readers.  She made a good point—as a reader, I’ll give up on a book that has characters that I [...]

My daughter got it into her head last week that she wanted an easel and a beret for Christmas. She sat on Santa’s lap and told him on Saturday. Actually, she told anyone [...]

Thanks Elizabeth for hosting me. I met Elizabeth at a Blog Book Tour Yahoo Group last year. That’s when I first learned about the term cosy mystery from her blog. I read romance [...]

Just a quick post today on keeping motivated. During NaNo, I noticed on Twitter, Facebook, and writing blogs that there were writers who mentioned that they’d gotten frustrated with NaNo and stopped participating. [...]

I’m hooking together two totally different things in my post today, but felt that they were connected because both topics bore me to death. :) Password Protection I was watching the news Monday [...]

There are things that I love about Blogger. Mostly that it’s free. :) And now I’ve invested too much time into this blog to change over to anything else. So Blogger and I [...]

Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past week. If you’re looking for a particular topic, just plug in your keyword into the search box at the top left-hand [...]

As writers, we spend a lot of time getting to know our characters and developing them. We learn how they’d react in different situations. We know people who remind us of our characters. [...]

I’ve had a couple of writers email me lately, looking for help with crafting a query letter. I’m always hesitant about offering help, myself, in that area. My agent queries never did get [...]

Twice in the last week, I’ve read posts by parents who want to write more, but have real obstacles in their way. These lovable obstacles are their children. :) As my children have [...]

Through the years, we’ve had a strange sort of holiday tradition where I put up a Christmas wreath on the door and Christmas candles in the windows and call the outdoor part of [...]

Somehow, upcoming releases seem a lot more real when you have a cover to go with them! I love this one. :) Thanks to the art department at Penguin’s Berkley Prime Crime. They [...]

I can usually tell when I’m about to have a day when my writing is going to be awful. I’ll have this moment where I think the blank page looks so much better [...]

Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past week. If you’re looking for a particular topic, just plug in your keyword into the search box at the top left-hand [...]

One thing that I really don’t think I  am, is curious. I like observing people.  I like imagining reasons that they do the things they do or say the things they say—but I’m [...]

I like to stay organized, but sometimes everything happens at once…and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. It’s my day to post at Inkspot and I hope you’ll pop by as I try to [...]

I emailed in my Memphis Barbeque III manuscript to my editor on Tuesday afternoon. :) I had a great time writing the book—particularly the end when I got to tie together some subplots [...]

Hi y’all. Today is my day on the Southern writers blog, A Good Blog is Hard to Find. Hope you’ll pop over for my post on all the ways that reading our favorite [...]