Best of 2011

#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 »

#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 »

“Tis the season for countdowns. My personal favorites are the top 100 songs of the year or decade — especially when the radio station playing the countdown is mostly commercial-free. I also enjoy countdowns of top books because usually I haven’t read most of them — which is why I am NOT doing a ‘top… Read more »