Nothing like getting stuck on the third chapter with 43 more to go. There's no time for my usual strategy either. Can't walk away from a first draft that's peppered with holes while a six-month deadline looms over my head.

Okay, here's the deal. A third body just washed to shore, I'm in the morgue, and the medical examiner swears he's found some evidence. I can't see it--I've tried but it's not there. Not yet anyway.

I'm too restless--distracted easily by the dumbest things. I…

Somewhere between the first novel I wrote (that I never finished because it was the first novel I wrote and I didn't know what the heck I was doing), and the initial writing of my Harper crime mystery series, I wrote several short stories and a few flash fictions. At the time my only purpose for writing them was to use them as a writing exercise to help me focus on developing the plot and to tighten my…

Received word that my short The Blue Goose will be in a future issue of Mysterical E. I do not know which issue, and just only hope it is the summer one :) but will be thrilled with anything.

More later as the news develops ...

Lord H has lost his watch– well, we couldn’t find it anywhere last night. He was comforted by the fact that he’d already set the alarm for 6.30am so it was a matter of waiting till it started beeping and then trying to find it. Good plan – if it had worked. But come 6.30 this morning and no beeping. The watch isn’t in the flat then. So it’s either in his car, at work or somewhere along the walk he took yesterday lunchtime. I’m not that worried, to be honest, as actually it’s been broken for…

CrimeSpace's own Charles Kelly is this week's interviewee.

Check it out here, as he talks about his book and how he got there from his career in journalism.

And promise, that blog's not all in italics. (This one won't let me type if I unitalicize it at the moment...)

I wasn't actually planning to do this until a few weeks from now, but my publisher has recently posted the first chapter of my latest book, THE CONCRETE MAZE. If you want to take a look, you can find it HERE. I should say that it is a hradboiled noir novel set in NYC in the early 1990s.

Enjoy and let me know what you think.

At last I heard from my agent that St Martin's has finally sent over the contract for two more Aristide Ravel mysteries. And now I have to write them. Yikes.

If you've read Game of Patience and/or A Treasury of Regrets, please send me encouragement as the prospect of starting all over again is fairly terrifying! How the heck do novels get written, anyway???

If you're already an Aristide fan, you can mark…

Ever wonder what mystery writers do when they're not plotting someone's death? If so there's a place to find out, even if you're curious about writers who are too far away to meet at a book signing. My good friend and fellow crime author Sunny Frasier pointed me to a great web site called Killer Hobbies - http://killerhobbies.blogspot.com/ - where six regulars and several other mystery authors go to discuss their off-hours activities. Sunny…

I was commenting on Amanda Stevens' blog about dolls when the windows of my brain finally clicked together into something that is so obvious, it's embarassing that it took me so long to put it together.

It's not so much that I didn't know what I was thinking. It was a matter of putting it into perspective - a good example to illustrate what I'm thinking.

Recently, I told you that many books I've reviewed have lacked the intensity expected in thrillers. I've been disappointed…

posted by Doranna

Ooh, it's that time again! A new cover!

It's been a while. Last fall, I was imminently expecting the cover for HIDDEN STEEL--and Silhouette canceled the Bombshell line. BACK TO THE RULES had also been completed...two covers worth of anticipation, squashed. So now I've just turned in the first Nocturne--contracts I picked up in the wake of those cancellations--which means it'll be a while before I see another Silhouette cover.

So…

Ellen Bob of the Los Altos (CA) bookstore Bob and Bob's tells me that Hadassah Magazine has the highest circulation of any Jewish periodical in the U.S.…

I passed my citizenship exam today and completed all paperwork, so I got clearance for my citizenship. The swearing in is next month.

No more INS for me. :-)

Fiction Nation - Tasha Alexander and Bob Fate