Have you Always Wanted to Write a Book?   I could never get above a B in Honors English. My family had moved to a ritzy suburb, and I’d transferred from a rougher, less prestigious high school into a swanky one where girls wore matching shoes and purses. I wore army fatigues and boots. The kids […]

Debra, thanks for inviting me to “It’s Not Always a Mystery.”  I’ve loved mysteries since I read my first Encyclopedia Brown and Nancy Drew books many moons ago. When I picked up my first Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Akroyd, I fell head over heels in love. I jumped into the deep end of […]

Recently, I read a blog post by writer Annette Dashofy in which she mentioned an idea that gave me pause. “As writers,” she wrote, “we tend to mine the emotional moments in our lives for story fodder.” This thought certainly rang true with me, but I hadn’t connected it to my most recent mystery series. […]

I write two mystery series, one set in the 1950s and one in current times. In plotting the mysteries, I start digging-researching actual events at the time and location of my story’s setting. For example, my upcoming Sydney Lockhart mystery, Murder at the Pontchartrain, is set in New Orleans, a city rich in culture and […]

Aah, who doesn’t love a good wedding? The flowers, the cake, and most important of all, the beautiful bride in her gorgeous dress. But then there’s the multitude of things that can go wrong on this most sacred of traditional days. The meddlesome mother-in-law, the groom still hungover from last night’s bachelor party, the photographer […]

By Judy Penz Sheluk There’s a word that authors use to describe themselves if their publishing contract has been terminated: orphaned. The technical term is “reversion of rights,” which means the publishing rights granted under the terms of the publishing contract are reversed and returned to the author. Once a reversion of rights is complete, […]

By Debra H. Goldstein Today, May 1, is often referred to as May Day. Traditionally, it is associated with celebrating flowers and spring, although at one point, it was put on calendars as being the first day of summer. Rituals associated with May Day flowers include leaving friends and strangers cone-shaped baskets of flowers attached […]

By Debra H. Goldstein Once again, my TBR (to be read) stack is out of control. I know I shouldn’t buy anymore books, but I can’t help myself. It seems that every time I’m on a panel, I need to buy at least one or more of the books written by the authors I appear […]

By Erica Miner “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”                          — Henri Bergson During my 21 years as a violinist with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, I often thought I would be playing that fiendishly difficult but most splendid of instruments […]

By Anne Louise Bannon Knowing how many of my writer friends genuinely struggle to get their novels completed, it would not be politic, as they say, for me to complain about getting stuck. After all, I am rather prolific. I attribute this to my obsessive nature and my background in journalism, which means that I […]