Where Ideas Come From

Guest Blogger: Alafair Burke My new book, LONG GONE, comes out today. I mention that not to plug my work (okay, it was totally a plug), but to explain why I’ve been thinking lately about where ideas come from. I finished writing LONG GONE nearly a year ago. For the last several months, …

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Modern Crime Fiction: Cool Science or Hot Characters?

Guest Blogger: D.P. Lyle Over the past decade I’ve answered literally thousands of medical and forensic questions for fiction writers. I think last count was somewhere north of 6000. One of the questions I’m often asked is: How much do I need to know about forensic science? The short answer …

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Funny Search Engine Terms

To throw something a little fun into the mix, I decided to blog about the funniest, unique or most interesting search engine keywords/phrases that brought people to my site and to include others. Here’s what we discovered. From Jen Forbus at Jen’s Book Thoughts, a book blog that covers the world of …

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True Fiction

Guest Blogger: Dennis Tafoya Here is a small sampling of where I’ve been spending my nights: The New Jersey Department of Corrections; The Uniform Crime Report of the FBI for 2010 (The good news, violent crime is down); Bersa Firearms (who offer a .380 semi-automatic with pink grips to support …

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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   Basically, I drafted three unpublished novels in the odd hours …

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The Good Life

Guest Blogger: Kelli Stanley So. The Writing Life. Or, as I insist on calling it, the good life. And not the “good life” that Jerome Bixby wrote about in his infamously horrific short story (later filmed as a Twilight Zone episode  with Bill Mumy—remember it? But I digress …). Maybe …

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Every Writer’s Best Friend

Guest Blogger: Brad Parks A dear friend of mine walked out on me yesterday, just left without word or warning. It happened around 8 o’clock in the morning, shortly after I sat down to my keyboard to write. I didn’t even hear him go. He just scooted out, leaving me …

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