posted by Jeanne Munn Bracken

I wrote an article a few weeks ago for the local newspaper about a doggy day care center. Visiting the place was a lot of fun and it made me want a dog again. Our old dog died last summer; I should blog about it, because she could have gone paw-to-paw with Marley for the title "World's Worst Dog." My husband and I are listening to the…

I just got an update on MWF guests posted on my blog by Rosemary Cameron from MWF outlining guests that we might be interested in.

Can you see the happy dancing that's going on in our house right this second! This is the update:

"Hello

just wanted to give you an idea of some of the crime/thriller writers coming to The Age Melbourne Writers' Festival this year.

There are some biggies like Jeffery Deaver, Karin Slaughter, Gabrielle Lord, Shane Maloney, Quintin…

posted by Lorraine Bartlett

Even as I type this, my kitchen sink scrub brush languishes in a glass of bleach. So fearful am I of salmonella, staphylococcus, listeria, e-coli, and the like.

Yes, I've been Kim and Aggie-ized.…

posted by Doranna Durgin

The Chaos Factor is sitting at my feet.

No, seriously.

Heading home from agility practice to write this blog, with nothing more on my mind than the simple pleasure of disembarking the car to travel all of ten feet to the hose, dogs in tow, to rinse us all of the powdery soft drought dust, we encountered chaos in the middle of the road. Standing there, stupidly staring at the car, tiny tongue sticking out slightly between…

There’s a thread going on over on 4MA that concerns the use of product names (and other authors' names) in a mystery novel. I’d like to give a few of my observations, but what I have to say could be construed by some to be BSP over there, though it’s not intended to be, so I’ll use this spot on Crimespace to say it. In my book Crown’s Law, the protag, P.I. Sam Crown, drives a red Camaro…

Hey,

Just a quick note to announce that the trade paperback of my novel LIGHTS OUT is now on sale in the US and Canada. To find out more about it you can go to www.jasonstarr.com and check out the cool new cover.

(The mass market of Lights Out is also available in the UK from Orion Books)

Thank you!!

Jason

Hey, have you visited Authors on the Web.com yet? What a cool site. First, it lists all the upcoming books from your favorite writers. Then there are links to lots of author newsletters, most of which have contests going. Click through and sign up, and you could win a book or some other prize. There is also lots of author news listed, but I must warn you that unlike many of my favorites, this web site focuses mostly on writers who are with big-name publishers. But it's a good way to keep…

Almost everyone has "catch phrases" of conversation, repeated words or groups of words that we unconsciously use as fillers. As a speech teacher, I can't tell you how many "Ums" and "You knows" I've drawn to the attention of novice speakers. Those are easy to identify, but in writing we tend toward certain words, too. Sometimes they're qualifiers ("it seemed as if"), sometimes modifiers ("very"), sometimes just a word or phrase that somehow makes the writer comfortable. Mine is "just", and I…

I'm reading Death Reins In by Michele Scott. LOVE it!

Check out my site: www.mysteryloverscorner.com for info about other mysteries.

If you are a writer and need to hire a freelance copy editor, check out my site: www.sleuthedit.com -- I only charge $2 per page and have great references.

I've also started designing web sites for authors. I'm loving it.

Just got back from a…

Submit an idea for a murder victim or villain to be used in Marilyn Meredith next mystery novel.

Prizes:

The first five books in the Deputy Tempe Crabtree series. The first one is trade paperback,

the other four are mass market paperback. They are all mysteries.

About the book series:

Tempe Crabtree is a Native American female deputy in a small mountain

community in the Southern Sierra of California called Bear…