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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Writing is Never Routine

Guest Blogger: Norb Vonnegut Many people ask about my “writing routine.” I think they expect to hear stories about a cone of silence—about me shutting the door on sounds or emails or any one of the million distractions that conspire to make authors unproductive. Well, the truth is I like …

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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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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   Basically, I drafted three unpublished novels in the odd hours …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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A Writer’s Tools and a Writer’s Process

Guest Blogger: Carla Neggers Thanks for having me here, Janice! Early in my career, I bought my first computer and started typing. Ah. I was in love. It was far more complicated and unreliable than computers are today, and, sure enough, one day I turned it on and got gobbledygook. …

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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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