A Long Journey To Publication For A Story About Immortal Love

Guest Blogger: Alma Katsu Even though my first novel, THE TAKER, wasn’t published until last year, I’ve been writing on and off my entire life. However, my career in intelligence (yes, I worked for CIA) made it hard to pursue publication and I stopped writing for a long time. Then …

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Building An Anthology

Guest Blogger: Toni L.P. Kelner Charlaine Harris and I have co-edited four urban fantasy anthologies together—HOME IMPROVEMENT: UNDEAD EDITION, the most recent, just came out this week. But I have to be honest—when Charlaine and I started working on our first anthology, we really weren’t that sure what anthologists did. …

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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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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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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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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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Best Advice I Ever Got

Guest Blogger: Brad Meltzer After my first novel was published, I struggled with the next one. I wasn’t worried what people thought (I was working on it long before the first one ever came out). And I wasn’t worried about the rejection (my first novel—still unpublished to this day—got me …

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Best of Bouchercon

I hit up a bunch of authors and other publishing professionals who attended Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, for a bit of writing wisdom they took away from the con. Here’s what they had to say: BRAD PARKS—If you’re going to take writing advice from anyone, might as well be Michael Connelly—I …

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Picking Favorites

Guest Blogger: J.T. Ellison At nearly every event I do, someone asks me which book in my Taylor Jackson series is my favorite. That question is nigh on impossible to answer, because you’re always in love with the book you just finished, because its done, and you’re always in love …

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