The Bionic Man is Here

Guest Blogger: Mark Alpert I was a nerdy kid who watched a lot of television in the 1970s, and my favorite show was THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. The best part of the program was the 90-second intro, which showed the disastrous mission that nearly killed astronaut Steve Austin (played …

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Tomorrow Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Guest Blogger: Jenny Milchman As I write this, a journey of thirteen years is going to come to an end, and another trip is about to start. It took me eleven years to find a publisher for my debut novel, and twenty-one months after that to ready the book for …

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Hope and Resources Expand for Innocent Women

Guest Blogger: Diane Fanning The problem of wrongful conviction is two-fold.  On one hand, an innocent person is torn away from family and friends, deprived of freedom and liberty and subjected to the depersonalization and abuse that is the hallmark of our prison system.  Secondly, the real perpetrator, emboldened by …

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Food Trucks and Hoarding

Guest Blogger: Lisa McMann I admit it. I love reality TV. I love the thrill of SURVIVOR, all the cooking shows, especially THE GREAT FOOD TRUCK RACE, and I am strangely fascinated by shows about people’s obsessions, addictions, and dark secrets. I’ve even been on a reality show called SEARCHING FOR …

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Five Key Ways I Built My Indigo World

Guest Blogger: Jordan Dane The inspiration behind Indigo Awakening (book #1 in the Hunted Series, Harlequin Teen) came from researching Indigo children. Query “Indigo Child” on the Internet and you’ll get over 8 million hits. Real life and headlines often inspire my books and this time is no exception. Conspiracy …

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Concept: Your Story’s Hollywood Pitch

Guest Blogger: John Robert Marlow So, you have a great story, and you want to pitch it to Hollywood. Before doing that—grab a stopwatch, start the clock and answer this question out loud: What’s your story about? Tickticktick… When you’re finished, check the time. If your answer took more than ten …

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WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS, WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?

Guest Blogger: Molly Cochran POISON is about the dark side of friendship. When we learn that people we’ve loved and trusted have betrayed or abandoned us, it hurts. It hurts every time, even if we aren’t completely innocent of the charges against us. After four girls in Ainsworth boarding school …

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Trust A Cop? Not The Amish!

Guest Blogger: Karen Harper Unless you know Amish thinking as well as I do, after studying and visiting them for twenty years and writing nine suspense novels set among them (or, OK, unless you remember the classic movie WITNESS,) you probably don’t realize the Amish usually “have no truck” with …

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Where Stories Come From

Guest Blogger: Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban Sometimes the inspiration for a story comes from an event in the writer’s past. That was the case for my young adult fantasy TWO MOON PRINCESS. Andrea’s journey from her medieval kingdom to modern day California and back parallels my own between Spain and the States, even …

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How Characters Change With Real Life

Guest Blogger: Eric Van Lustbader When I created the character of Jack McClure for FIRST DAUGHTER, I made him very much like me. He was a dyslexic. My dyslexia is far less severe than Jack’s is, but nonetheless it created both challenges and advantages for me. I kept exchanging letters …

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