You are going to get it wrong. It is as fundamental to the craft as rejection, procrastination and gravity. A pursuit that requires you to put yourself into the heart and brain of another human being will lead you to…
I’m wending my way home from Bouchercon 2016, held in amazing New Orleans. I’ve spent five days at a 2,000 person event talking myself hoarse, chugging coffee and other liquids, and attending some terrific panels and talks. Overall I had…
Another anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. Like everyone in the country, I can tell you exactly where I was when the planes hit the twin towers. But what about today’s teens, who were only infants or toddlers…
At the beginning of this year I started up on a new revision of a book I’d been working on for two years. And for two years I’d been swimming inside the world of the story, intimate with its characters,…
Shakespeare did it. Flannery O’Connor did it. Jonathan Franzen does it all the time. Every playwright, short story writer, and novelist does it as a matter of course, yet there is still plenty of debate over the writer’s right to…
Louise Miller’s delightful debut novel, The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living, follows pastry chef Olivia Rawlings from Boston to idyllic Guthrie, Vermont following a workplace accident precipitated by a flambé dessert. Olivia’s life in Guthrie takes an unexpected turn…