5 Reasons Why I Love Libraries

1. One of my favorite memories from my childhood is of going to the library on Saturday mornings, checking out a huge stack of books, coming home and spreading them across the floor, deciding what order to read them, and then digging in to those pages that magically transformed me …

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5 Best Books of 2013

There were a ton of books I wanted to read this year, but I couldn’t get to them all. Here’s my five favorites of those I enjoyed (in no particular order). 1. The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson — “Lennie plays second clarinet in the school orchestra and has always …

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Call It What You Like

Guest Bogger: Christopher Golden I don’t worry about labels.  Never really have.  And I try to pass on that disregard for labels to my children.  Let’s face it, we put people into categories in our minds and sometimes we even speak those labels aloud.  In school, it’s done by students …

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Overturning Convention

Guest Blogger: Joe McKinney Zombies are the monster world’s equivalent of a good pair of blue jeans: they go well with just about anything.  In recent years, they’ve gone up against everybody from the police and the military to superheroes, the cast of Star Wars, vampires and unicorns.  They’ve even …

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Write, Learn, Repeat

Guest Blogger: James Scott Bell Somewhere inside me lurks the shadow of Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner, of course, wrote the Perry Mason series. He was at one time, right up into the 1960s, the world’s best-selling writer. It was a testimony to two things. First, his dogged determination. He wrote …

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Editing Techniques

Guest Blogger: Lincoln Crisler I play G.I. Joe for a living and write scary stuff in my spare time. Janice has been good enough to let me climb aboard and share a bit of my magic with you and suggested my editing techniques as a possible topic of interest. This …

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Writing Habits for Success

Guest Blogger: Lisa Gardner When I first started out as a writer, I wrote on a shared computer in the college computer lab during the free time I had after my classes, homework and work study job were all completed.   Basically, I drafted three unpublished novels in the odd hours …

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Inspiration through Research

Guest Blogger: David Sakmyster “You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” – J.R.R. Tolkien My favorite part about the writing process (next to typing ‘The End’ at the appropriate spot, and sending said object of my blood, sweat …

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My Ode to the True Crime Fan

Guest Blogger:   M. William Phelps Janice was kind enough to ask me to blog here (something I don’t do much anymore), and I gratefully appreciate her thinking of me in this regard. This is an important year for me. A moment I have worked toward for nearly a decade. LOVE …

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A Writer Puts It All on the Line

Guest Blogger: Michael Palmer First of all, I want to thank Janice for inviting me to guest blog on her website. I actually love writing when there are few or no restrictions, and this is one of those situations. So I’m going to do what I do best—ramble. As of …

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