Fact/Fiction: The beautifully blurry line – in writing, life, and religion

  Guest Blogger: Jon Jefferson, the “writer” half of Jefferson Bass Medieval mystery meets modern murder in Jefferson Bass’s latest Body Farm thriller     Writing THE INQUISITOR’S KEY– a crime novel set in France – required a research trip to Avignon, a walled city in Provence, nestled in a …

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25% of You… Is Patented!

Guest Blogger: Brian Andrews Medical practitioners and medical researchers have always been joined at the hip, but with the advent of modern genetics, they’ve become strange bedfellows. The weirdness started in early 1950’s with an American woman named Henrietta Lacks. Lacks was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer …

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Hooking the Reader

Guest Blogger: Dakota Banks Browsers in a bookstore scan the shelves, eyes moving rapidly from book to book. If your books are spine-out rather than face-out, you have only your title and your name to get the buyer to pick up your book. If your book is face-out, you have …

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Is There a Writer Gene?

Guest Blogger: Donna Galanti Is there a writer gene and is storytelling genetic?  NY Times Best Selling Author Jonathan Maberry thinks so. As a student in his Write a Novel in 9 Months class he noted that we either have the urge to write or we don’t. I believe this …

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The Book of Lost Fragrances

Guest Blogger: M.J. Rose “He struggled to separate out the notes he recognized from the ones he didn’t, searching for the ingredients that gave the blend its promise of hope, of long nights and voluptuous dreams, of invitation and embrace. Of an everlasting covenant ripe with possibility. Of  lost  souls reunited.”   …

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Writing for the Thrill

Guest Blogger: D. L Wilson A thriller novel must be exciting, a real page turner, a book that readers just can’t put down. A successful thriller must start with a bang, build excitement, create tension, and finish with a bigger bang. After writing a university textbook and a cookbook to …

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H is for…

Guest Blogger: Alexander Gordon Smith In five days I head off to the States again for a book tour. It’s so exciting!! I’m in Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York, which are four places I have always wanted to visit. I know it’s going to be an amazing, if …

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Just because you can…

Guest Blogger: Marie Lamba Fiction writers can create a story out of anything, and every character they put down on paper can have their own conflict, their own storyline. This is both a blessing and a curse. When writing my new paranormal novel DRAWN, I knew I was creating what, …

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Start Here

Guest Blogger: Daniel Palmer When it comes to writing novels, beginnings can be difficult. A blank page at first appears liberating, but it can soon become utterly paralyzing. As writers, we’ve been taught to grab the reader’s attention in the first few pages—the first sentence if possible—and then hold it …

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On the Fear of Writing

Guest Blogger: Caragh M. O’Brien Please understand: I am not an insecure or fearful person. I’m strong and tough, and I laugh at myself regularly. Spiders and mice can’t throw me, and I’m only marginally afraid of the dark or donning a bikini. But today, I’m afraid of writing, and in …

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