Women Writers

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 […]

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

A Crafty Collage of Crime, the twelfth book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series, released this past June. I’ve spent much of the summer in promo mode, mostly on blog tours, podcasts, and Zoom events. At the end of this week, I’ll be attending Killer Nashville with Debra, many other authors, and those wishing

One of my favorite funny stories about writing comes from my friend Susan Elia MacNeal, who has published ten Maggie Hope mysteries set in WWII. In researching, Susan read Winston Churchill’s letters, where she found he used the abbreviation “OMG.” It’s not as surprising as it sounds; because telegrams were expensive and priced by the

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