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…

I am always looking for ways to connect with my readers. And so, from time to time, I devote one of my blogs (www.xanga.com/doahsdeer) to writing collaborative stories with my readers. I'll post the first few hundred words and invite my readers to write the story along with me. We write without a plan, without even an idea who our co-writers will be. Quite simply, I invite my readers to post the next section of the story as a comment at my blog.…

Posted by Sheila Connolly

I was planning to give you another profound, insightful and educational commentary about the literary world and the writer's life. And then I said to myself, forget it–it's summer.

So I'm going to talk about t-shirts. Summer reading, lite.

So there I was, standing in the local supermarket, guarding the full shopping cart while my husband went back and bought the six things he had forgotten the first time through, which took a while. Being a…

Posted by Leann Sweeney

I'm not talking about drugs or Alzheimer's here, though at times spaced out does describe my mental state. Okay, maybe half the time. Anyway, I am talking about the Internet. Again. I suppose a hundred years from now, when people can transfer their thoughts without benefit of keyboard or telephone or writing something in longhand (longhand probably won't take a hundred years to disappear), they will look back on how we socialize and publicize and…

posted by Jeanne Munn Bracken

About 20 years ago when my first book was published by an eminently respectable publisher, I received a form inviting my inclusion in Contemporary Authors (CA). I am a librarian, so I know that CA is a respected biographical source used often by students and other researchers.

I had a flash fantasy of professors wearing elbow-patched jackets, drawing on their pipes and helping their seminars limn the depths of Children With Cancer: A…

posted by Doranna Durgin



Yes, I'm back from another dog show/trial...last of the season for the this area. And although we did well enough in terms of success, the contrast between this show and the previous weekend's show is something I'm still pondering.



The first weekend held an agility trial. It was a single event show--agility only--held in a quiet park in a beautiful little high desert town just outside Sitgreaves National Forest. In most agility…

In his engaging documentary Oh Dad (BBC Radio4 Sunday) Lloyd Robson explored the surprising secret life of film noir legend Robert Mitchum.…