My Wishes for 2024
May 2024 Bring You a Rainbow of Happiness.
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Blogpost
The Bethlehem Writers Group and The Bethlehem Writers 2024 Short Story Award Competition by Marianne H. Donley
I’m a member of The Bethlehem Writers Group, LLC (BWG), a community of mutually supportive fiction and nonfiction authors based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania—and beyond. We are as different from each other as our stories. While we started as a critique group and still meet three times a month to critique each other’s work, BWG also
PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS: What You Don’t Know About the Genre May Keep You from Reading a Great Book! by Lisa Malice
E.B. Davis is one the many amazing authors with whom I blog-share Writers Who Kill. Her November 15th post spotlighted my debut thriller, Lest She Forget, with an interview and a blunt admission—as a cozy and paranormal mystery writer, she was not a fan of genre and didn’t expect to enjoy my tale. But Lest
Every Main Character Needs a Sidekick by Sandra Murphy
There comes a time in a mystery where the main character needs to recap the clues, red herrings, misguided non-help, and possibilities without dumping a truckload of previously read information on the page. A sidekick is necessary so the characters can bounce around ideas, ask questions about a clue the reader may have missed, eliminate
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Branching Out? By Rosalie Spielman
Thank you, Debra, for hosting me! I am one happy gal in the fall. Like many of you, I adore autumn—the leaves, the crisp air, the scent of spices in the air and in the pastries, sweaters and cozy socks… One of the additional things I love is seeing the trees being stripped bare. Don’t
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The Long and the Short of It by Roger Johns
Debra, thank you for inviting me to be on It’s Not Always a Mystery. In my case, the title of your blog turns out to literally be true. When I first began writing, with serious publication ambitions, which would have been around 2007 or 2008, it seemed as if mystery fiction, or some variation thereof,
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A Beach Bum’s Journey to Becoming an Author by George Cramer
Until my late sixties, I never thought of writing fiction, let alone a novel. In high school, I rarely did homework; with a few exceptions, I could score Cs on most tests. The exception was Latin. Mr. Jung inspired me to work on translations and understanding the dead language. I’ve forgotten it all. My English
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THE FIFTY-FIVE-YEAR PLAN by Josh Pachter
My first short story appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1968. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to sell over a hundred more to EQMM, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and many other periodicals and anthologies, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society awarded me its Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement in 2020. Despite this long
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We Must Remember by Debra H. Goldstein
Twenty-two years have passed since September 11, 2001. Twenty-two years since terrorists hijacked four airplanes to carry out suicide attacks in the United States. Almost 3000 people were killed and even more had their lives and families forever disrupted. Many of us remember where we were when two planes hit the Twin Towers of the
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What Preoccupies Us as Writers Keeps Showing Up by Lynn Slaughter
The first time someone asked me to present a workshop on writing for young adults, I prepared not only by mining my own experiences as a YA mystery writer, but by reading extensively on the subject. A couple of themes emerged again and again: Young adult readers are above all concerned with the emotional journey
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