Laura Ellen

#1  5 Tips for the Apocalypse As a 2012 debut YA author, I belong to the Apocalypsies – a group of YA and MG authors whose books are all coming out in 2012. As part of our bio on the website, we are all listing five things in relation to the Apocalypse such as the… Read more »

#3 Oh, the Places I Had to Go: My Rocky Road Writing BLIND SPOT My novel BLIND SPOT walks a fine line between two very different genres: thriller/mystery and contemporary/literary ‘issue’ book. I found as I was writing that it is difficult to balance between the two. When I began writing BLIND SPOT, I wanted… Read more »

#4 Putting the ‘creep’ in Creepy Photo by Brenda Mihalko In his vlog post ‘Who’s This Guy? Why Does He Write Weird Junk?‘ Daniel Marks mentioned how the king of horror, Stephen King, uses kids to put the ‘creep’ in creepy in his classic Salem’s Lot. King knows that when readers pick up a book… Read more »

#5 What I’ve Learned About Writing from Watching Project Runway I’m guilty. I watch reality television. Not all of it; some shows are simply a flimsy platform created for idiots in search of quick fame. I do have my favorites though, like Survivor, Amazing Race, and Project Runway. My husband rolls his eyes when I… Read more »

#6: How I Became a Writer I was very jealous at age three. I didn’t understand why my sister got to go to kindergarten every morning and bring all these exotic looking papers and books home, and I couldn’t. I took to eavesdropping and spying on her while she did her homework – especially when… Read more »

#7: A Writing DNA Selection on Character Building Over on the Sleuths, Spies, and Alibis blog we have a feature called Writing DNA where we share writing tips, inspirations, etc. Here is one of mine from 2011:   Could you write the life story of the person in this photo? Of course not! You don’t… Read more »

#8: The Scary Art of Query Writing Let’s face it, query writing can be scary. Most of us would much rather begin writing a new novel than boil down the one we just finished into a short, concise pitch. But if the rest of the world is to read that finished novel, you’ll have to… Read more »

#9: Writing In the Dark: A Few Technical Tips Our theme on the Sleuths, Spies, Alibis blog for October was Writing in the Dark. I decided for my post to get a little technical on how to make your mystery, well, dark. Here it is: While you need a good plot and great characters with… Read more »

In the words of Staind, a favorite band, It’s Been A While. I am slowly getting a handle on all this book writing stuff. The journey has been so fun, but I am finding it hard to keep up sometimes — especially now with the holidays barking at my heels. As a result, I have… Read more »

This week on The Nightstand we are sharing our ‘Writing Cribs’ so I thought I would re-post here too. It is my first official vlog — even though I am not in it — so be nice! My Writing Space