Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past week. I’m setting this up as a Sunday installment on Mystery Writing is Murder. If you’re looking for a particular topic, [...]

If someone tells me that they are a writer, I don’t tend to question it. Anyone who loves to write and does so recreationally is indeed a writer. “Being a writer” is about [...]

I’ve always thought that if we don’t stretch ourselves, we don’t grow. But stretching doesn’t always feel good. And sometimes we end up pulling things. My friend asked if I wanted to go [...]

Apparently on Thursdays I have a subconscious desire to take over everyone’s Google Readers with my posts. :) This is the second Thursday in a row that I’m writing for 4 different blogs [...]

One thing that I’ve noticed with my writing is that I swing back and forth in my opinion of the draft I’m working on. What I aim for is to feel good about [...]

I think that, as a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about my protagonists’ strengths. What are they good at? Where do they excel? How can I play to their strengths? [...]

I was a huge fan of cozy mysteries long before I ever sat down to write one. What exactly are cozy mysteries and how does one go about writing one? Please pop over [...]

Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past week. I’m setting this up as a Sunday installment on Mystery Writing is Murder. If you’re looking for a particular topic, [...]

The release of Delicious and Suspicious is getting really close, y’all. Close enough for me to run a contest. :) First of all, if you’d like to get acquainted with my protagonist, Lulu [...]

Today I have the pleasure of having Margot Kinberg guest post on the blog. Margot is a mystery writer (her newest, B-Very Flat has just been released.) But Margot is also a mystery [...]

Sometimes we just run into some problems or conflicts when we need to write. Just like there are internal and external conflicts, there are also internal and external factors that seem bound and [...]

I think life moved a little slower a few decades ago. It seemed to, anyway. I certainly remember having four TV channels and getting up to change to another station. But these days [...]

‘Information dump’ is one of those terms that’s so descriptive, I could guess its meaning right away. We can get information dumped on us as a reader in several different ways—in backstory (what [...]

It’s Sunday afternoon as I write this and I’m at the swimming pool with the children. It’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit and there are about 200 people crowding the pool. I seem to be [...]

I have a hidden talent that I’ve kept secret on this blog. I can recite approximately 24 Teletubbie episodes by heart. No, this isn’t an ability that I’m particularly proud of. I know [...]

A few days ago I was visiting Mason Canyon’s blog, Thoughts in Progress and saw she’d posted on writer’s block. Mason writes for a newspaper, and she mentioned that when you’re writing articles [...]

Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past 5-6 days. If you’re looking for a particular topic, just plug in your keyword into the search box at the top [...]

Sometimes I notice themes in the blogosphere as writers struggle with the same problem. In this case, I think the bottom line is time…and our lack of it. Recently there have been 4 [...]

Janice Hardy ran a post on her Story Flip blog on those times when you want to show that time has passed as the protagonist learned a new skill or developed a new [...]

One of the most popular posts that I tweeted last week was this one: http://zenhabits.net/creative-habit/ on Leo Babauta’s excellent Zen Habits blog. His post, summing, up was on the number one habit of [...]

I have a week and a half until my children’s schools let out for the summer. This time last year, I was completely horrified at that realization. This year? Not so much. Because [...]

First of all, I’d like to make a little plug for my upcoming release, Delicious and Suspicious, written under my Riley Adams pen name. Today, my book is reviewed on Mason Canyon’s book [...]

This is a subject I haven’t worked out for myself yet, but I’ve been thinking about it. There are definitely some authors that, when you say their name, you get an image of [...]

Writing a novel is often compared to running a marathon – the necessary training, tenacity, endurance, passion, and sheer will to finish are shared by both endeavors.  I trained for a marathon but [...]

Sometimes I read books and the protagonists just leave me completely cold. The books frequently have plenty of conflict. Bad things happen to these characters and we’re supposed, as readers, to care about [...]

An author, or aspiring author, website or blog plays a lot of important roles. We can entice new readers, sell books, and generally offer a professional image of ourselves to people in the [...]

Yesterday I was cooking and opened a cabinet for a Corningware dish. It wasn’t there. After a lot of looking, I found it in a completely different location of the kitchen in a [...]

This past weekend I ran into a couple of different artists selling their work. The first time I was at (of all places) Walmart. There was a man in the parking lot, approaching [...]

My friend Jan asked me yesterday to elaborate a little more on Twitter—mostly how to make connections to share her blog posts with a wider audience of readers. So let’s say you’re on [...]

Here are writing links that I’ve posted to Twitter for the past 7 days. If you’re looking for a particular topic, just plug in your keyword into the search box at the top [...]