If you follow me regularly on Twitter or Facebook, you probably know I’ve left the fabulous mystery blog Murderati. You can read all about it here. In a nutshell: if I’m going to write three books a year and raise five kids, something had to give. I’ve talked about social media in the past, the pros and cons (and there are pros and cons, don’t let anyone tell you it’s all good or it’s all bad.) Blogging is part of “social media” but I think it goes a step beyond. It’s easy to Tweet a comment or retweet a link… Read More

Yesterday, an aspiring writer emailed me and asked if I had any advice. I told her: write every day, learn to discern advice from critique groups (or anyone who reads your work) to figure out if it makes your story stronger or not, be self-critical without being self-defeating, and edit ruthlessly. Few published authors sold their first completed manuscript–I sold my fifth. So if you love to write, and knew today that you would never be published, and yet you still wrote, you’re halfway to publication. That “I sold my fifth” means only one thing: I didn’t give up. Most… Read More

I’m in the middle of completely redesigning my website. Okay, I’m not the one doing the design–I hired someone for that–but I am working on content. I’ve been going through my website and deciding what should stay and what should go. The first thing I’ve doing is dumping my personal blog. I never really had anything to say there, and rarely post. I post here and at Murderati bi-weekly, and at Romancing the Blog bi-monthly, and that’s enough for me. Probably too much–but right now it’s manageable most of the time. I’m adding a connecting characters chart or page of… Read More