By Lois Winston Do you have a grammar pet peeve? I do, thanks to Peggy Riley Hughes, my seventh and eighth-grade English teacher. Because of Mrs. Hughes, I cringe whenever I hear or read poor grammar. If the world had more Peggys, I’d cringe a lot less. To boldly go where no man has gone […]

By Bethany Maines In this day of Marvel Universes and streaming limited– run shows, no, it’s not a surprise that it’s a sequel. It seems like everyone is embracing the sequel world-building ethos. But how is it that Marvel is thriving while DC can’t seem to figure out how to connect… anything? Or, for that […]

By James M. Jackson Answer me this: It’s summer. I point to any sugar maple in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan forest my protagonist Seamus McCree calls home and ask, what color are its leaves? We all know the answer: green. Yet, what I cannot know is if the “green” you see is the same […]

By Barbara Kyle Mystery. Thriller. Romance. Science Fiction. Horror. The publishing industry uses these labels for what they call “genre” novels. Literary critics often dismiss genre novels as lightweight, even trivial. But are they? After all, it can be argued that even classic literary novels fall within the bounds of some genre. Jane Austen’s Pride […]

As some of you know, writers today are responsible for a significant portion of their books’ virtual and in-person promotion work. Marketing is fun but, at the same time, can be draining. I tend to push very hard for the month before and after a book’s release date. That means up to twelve hours a […]

The word vagabond strolled into my head the other day. I’ve always liked the word so I was happy to see it and to have it stick around for a while. I like the sound of it—full and round but with concrete edges in the G and the D, and with that tiniest buzz you […]

By Meri Allen (aka Shari Randall) I’ll never forget the moment I opened the email from my editor announcing the title of my cozy mystery debut in the Lobster Shack Mystery series. I was sitting across the breakfast table from my daughter who was enjoying a bowl of cereal when I read the title. “Curses, […]

Five Belles Too Many, the fifth Sarah Blair mystery from Kensington, releases June 28th and there still is so much to do. Here’s what’s going on, here’s what needs to still be done, and here’s where you might be able to help: I’m in the middle of a Great Escapes Tour. It began on June […]

By Susan Van Kirk For the past eight years, I’ve written a series called the Endurance Mysteries. Their setting is the small town of Endurance in west central Illinois. The same main characters inhabit each book, so over these years I’ve grown to know these imaginary people quite well. It would be easy to keep […]