I’m often asked what compels me to write mysteries. I know I’ve always been interested in crime fiction because that’s the genre I’ve read from a very young age. Devouring the Nancy Drew mysteries quickly evolved into reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and Dorothy L. Sayer’s […]

You’d think a multi-author anthology titled Larceny & Last Chances: 22 Stories of Mystery & Suspense would only include stories of mystery and suspense. And it does. Kind of. By that I mean, just like Debra’s “It’s Not Always a Mystery” tagline for her website (where it kind of is, but isn’t), several of the […]

The Luther Hotel is located on the Texas Gulf Coast in the small town of Palacios. You can walk out the front door across a lush, green lagoon and, a few seconds later, have your feet in the water.  In 1999, my husband and I hugged the coastline from Rockport to Galveston. When we drove […]

Audiences have a seemingly endless appetite for ripped-from-the-headlines plots, as thirty years and multiple iterations of the Law & Order franchise will attest. A faux newspaper headline even features in the opening credits of Law & Order: SVU, in case viewers missed the point. These shows typically open with an incident reminiscent of a notorious […]

The third and final book of my Art Center Mysteries just came out, and it is designed to end a three-book set. I’d never designed a series with a specific length before, and these three books create an entire story that begins with Death in a Pale Hue, continues through Death in a Bygone Hue, […]

I’m currently reading a book about a less-than-likable protagonist. If I were reading it for pleasure, I would have stopped by now, but I had agreed to review the book. I will plow ahead, hoping the protagonist eventually sees the error of her ways and miraculously develops some much-needed empathy. However, since I’m three-quarters of […]

Usually, I introduce you to writers you might not otherwise know through my blog. This time, I’m going to tell you a personal secret that it often takes authors a few years to realize: a story or idea is never a one and done deal. They can often be recycled in numerous ways. For example, […]

I am often asked about where my ideas for stories come from. Generating ideas has never been a problem. Finding the time to use all of them is usually the issue. Ideas are everywhere, but keeping track of them is also a challenge.  My laptop bag and purse are full of sticky notes of all […]

When you sit down to write a short story, do you have the ending in mind? Or do you let the story unroll and discover where it’s going only when you get there? Endings are my biggest challenge, and I suspect a major challenge for many writers. I have rewritten endings time and again, each […]

My last guest post for Debra’s blog was about being a vagabond writer-one who likes the adventure of taking her characters from town to town or starting over with new stories in new locations. I’ve set stories in towns from the east coast to the west and especially in one place between the two-northeast Tennessee. […]