I saw a post on a forum yesterday about why a person should be a reader, and it made me want to add my own arguments. And what's a blog for except to say what I want to say at any given moment?

As an ex-English teacher, I spent years trying, sometimes with success but mostly not, to convince high school students that reading was not only good for them but fun as well. I guess it's something a person has to learn for himself, and it often takes a while. My father didn't begin reading…

Several people I've met in the writing business got their start not by the traditional write-a-letter-get-an-agent-who-will-find-a-publisher method, but by entering a contest. Contests are a good way to get noticed, to see if your work is noteworthy, and to achieve publication.

Sometimes you win, and that's great. Winning the better contests in any given genre usually means publication, and that's great. But some I've met didn't win the contest but still caught the attention of an…

I don't know about anyone else, but life keeps getting in the way of my writing. Just about the time I plan on having a whole day to hammer out the plot details of a project, something comes up that calls for me to be somewhere else for a large portion of the day. Maybe I'm weak-minded, but it seems that once I've spent several hours in a store, a car, a meeting, or a public building, I can't drag my mind back to the proper set for effective writing. At best I get some editing in, but very…

I went to see Steve Hamilton speak in Charlevoix, Michigan last night, and it was a good decision. I've enjoyed the Alex McKnight series for several reasons, primarily the Michigan settings that are familiar to me, the characters who are so well-drawn and lifelike, and the fact that my husband also likes them so we can talk about them together. (His usual Vietnam-era memoirs aren't so much fun for me.)

Steve is an entertaining and personable speaker who just talks about what he does…

I was surprised not too long ago to get a call from an acquaintance with a problem. As we had talked over the years about writing, he'd told me he had several manuscripts in a drawer somewhere that he'd written as a younger man. He was interested in my quest for publication but maintained that he was too busy with work and family to try it himself. But when the news came that his job would disappear within a few months, he contacted me to ask about getting an agent. It seems he considered…

People can't help but wonder when they have a friend who is an author: Am I in the story somewhere? Of course we use people we know for characters, otherwise everyone in the book would be just like the author.

You needn't fret, however, about looking bad or silly or pathetic. Like the children we create but can't control, once a character steps into a story he or she becomes a unique individual. I may want a character to do something brave, but if it isn't in him, he'll refuse, and…

Authors speak of their works in progress in a variety of ways: with excitement, with concern, with joy, and with anticipation. There's a feeling that comes with starting a new manuscript that for me is an odd combination of thrill and dread.

It wasn't always that way. When I first began writing, I just wrote, and when I finished that first MS, I was thrilled to be "done" with a "book." Wrong on both counts. It certainly wasn't done, and it never became a book. It's just a collection…

Mr. Rodgers used to sing about them, but most of us don't know them anymore. Even though I'm rural and have lived in this area forever, I don't neighbor much, seldom talk to the mailman or go next door to borrow something.

That doesn't mean I don't have connections. The internet, anonymous monster that it can be, is a creator of networks. I "know" people through this medium that I'll never meet. I share ideas with them, tell them about my mood today, and frequently ask for their help…

I had lunch with a fellow author a while back, and she had come to the end of two series contracts, having written six books. She was in the position of starting over, sort of, and wrestling with the question: What next?

It's one that writers face at the end of a book or a series, unless there's a series so popular that the public won't let it end. I heard Martha Grimes speak on that, and it's a problem of a different kind, but today I'm thinking of the "What's next?" aspect. Do you…

When someone finds out that I'm an author, a question often crops up that I've never found a good answer for. People want to know how long it took to write the book. Although I've come up with a reply in order to sound competent and capable, the real answer is, I have no idea.

Is the time it takes to write a book that initial few months when the ideas come so fast and furiously that I barely have time to write one scene down before the next one starts pushing its way into my head? Is…

I'm about to start a series of talks at local libraries on mystery sub-genres, and it's led me to some interesting people. I wanted to offer my audiences two authors' work as representative of each sub-genre: one very successful author and one who is just getting started but is promising. Since my reading within the mystery genre as a whole is pretty eclectic, I thought finding enough examples would be easy. I advertised for nominations in the sub-genres I'm less familiar with, meaning to…

Okay, fellow mystery writers, confess: Have you begun to see possibilities for murder in everyday situations? Does the idea cross your mind in certain instances that the world might be better off without _____, and you have just the method to accomplish it? Oh, it's only idle thought, and you'd never act on it, but it's the tiniest bit satisfying to realize that if you had to, you could make the world a better place and never get caught, right?

I thought so. Writing about murder…

For five years now I've been reading advice from publishers, editors, agents, and fellow writers about how to succeed in the business of selling a book. I have had some success, but I also feel at times like I'm buried in advice.

Don't start with a prologue! You must have a hook! Format exactly as the industry demands! Number your pages on the right! No, number on the left, next to the slug! Make the first line block style! Indent EVERY paragraph! Ban widow/orphan control! Make your…

It's bad enough that I still say that I roll down the car window and dial a phone number. We old folks still talk about records and tapes even though we have nothing in our music cabinets but CDs. It's acceptable to say something in writing and type on a computer. We park our cars in the driveway and drive them on the parkway.

If you think about it too much, words can make you crazy. I guess the thought came to me because it's…

I have a book coming out in January called Macbeth's Niece. I don't know where my idea for the story came from, but most writers don't, I suppose. We don't choose to write about a particular subject. A plot forms in your head and you can't stop thinking about it until you write it down.

Anyway, Macbeth's Niece sold, so now I'm asked all the time, "What's the name of your book?" The first thing I noticed is that "Macbeth's Niece" is very hard to get across verbally…

I was pretty quiet about wanting to publish until I got my first contract. In a small town, announcing that you've written a book is an invitation to "Who does she think she is?" comments behind your back. Once I got that contract, however, it became necessary to come out of the book closet and start down the endless road of marketing and promotion.

The most surprising thing is how many phone calls I've gotten from people who have also written a book. They want to know how I got…

I admit it; I've become a picky reader. Becoming more aware of writing as I practice the craft, I am increasingly intolerant of writers who are sloppy and formulaic. In the last two days I've started no less than five books only to drop them in the give-away pile an hour or so later. It's something I never would have done in the past, but I've decided that there's too much good writing out there to waste my time on junk.

I've ranted here before about secondary characters who have no…

I'll still take more oldie stories if you've got one, but I'm back to ruminating on writing. I'm doing research for a sequel to Macbeth's Niece, and it reveals what a quagmire I've gotten myself into. You see, there's the real Macbeth, who lived and died a king and never murdered anyone that we know of, and there's Shakespeare's Macbeth, the character that most of us know. After he died (not killed by Macduff or anyone else at that battle, which was not at Birnam Wood), his stepson…

The life of a GI is pretty lonely over here. A guy gets to thinking of a girl at home, one who is true to him, who waits patiently for the day he comes back so they can get married and start a family. Unfortunately, I didn't have a girl like that. But Bill, the guy in the next bunk, had Sue.

Sue wrote to Bill every day, and he seemed to get stronger as soon as that envelope was in his hand. I would ask him to read the letters aloud, and as he read, I imagined Sue writing those things…