February 8, 2017
Years ago I had an editor ask me to change my point-of-view (pov) character from a female to a male. I’d written some books where I’d used both povs, but I wasn’t sure I could pull off a story written completely in the male pov. What I discovered was I had to go deeper into […]
December 14, 2016
First, I want to report that my interview with Jim Christina and Bobbi Bell on LATalkRadio “The Writer’s Block” went well and was fun. I always like talking about my books and writing in general. Also it was great that they both liked A Killer Past. (Wouldn’t it be terrible if the hosts said something […]
March 2, 2016
Sometimes a disaster turns into a great adventure. (Of course that’s because I’m not the one, in this case, who will have to pay for the damage.) Last month, Mary Ann Aug, a fellow sister in Sisters in Crime, responded when I asked if anyone going to Sleuthfest would be willing to share a the […]
February 10, 2016
Dialogue is used for a variety of purposes. To convey information To help define character To break up the monotony of long passages of narrative and provide more white space on the page Dialogue tags are the narrative that tells the reader who is speaking. “Good morning, students,” the teacher said. “Help!” she screamed, hoping […]
August 13, 2014
Recently I spent some time critiquing another writer’s work. The writer does dialogue quite well, but every so often she went on and on with the dialogue without breaking it up with dialogue tags or narrative tags. Everything was correctly punctuated, even when she had three paragraphs in a row of dialogue from the same speaker, […]
February 13, 2013
I go to the pool to use the hot tub for my back and to listen to people talk. I admire writers who give their characters distinctive voices. Word usage, sentence structure, even the tempo of the speech can distinguish one character from another without the addition of dialogue tags or mentioning their names. Since […]