How many ways can you give away books? I’m not sure, but I must be trying to find out today! With the release date for my new Hidden Springs Mystery, Murder Is No Accident, rapidly approaching, the publishers and I are trying to get people to visit Hidden Springs. That’s my little town with a good compliment of quirky small …
For an author, there’s nothing quite like holding in your hand that book that you’ve spent many long hours writing. You started with a shimmer of an idea. You added characters. You built a setting. You entangled your characters into all sorts of situations. Maybe some fun ones. Or romantic ones, or even dangerous ones for a mystery like Murder …
I’m guessing that hardly any of you can remember when you didn’t have electricity. I don’t. There have been those times when we have had power outages for one reason or another. Two times in the last few years we lost electricity for a week due to ice storms. In the terrible ice storm in 2009, light poles fell like …
Did you watch the Super Bowl? While basketball is my favorite sport to watch, I sometimes like football too, especially the Super Bowl. Even if you don’t like football, you’re supposed to like the commercials. Can you believe that one 30 second commercial cost 5 million dollars? Well, a million dollars is way past my imagination, but I suppose those …
Quilts connect the past with the present and the future. Since I let Wednesday slip by without thinking about it being Wednesday, I came up a post short on One Writer’s Journal this week. That happens sometimes when I’m trying to dig a new story out of my head and working toward a deadline. So I went into my blog …
February 1, 1966 Jocie Brook here reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. I’ll have to keep Dad from seeing that headline. He would sit me down and give me a long talk about hating any day. He’d tell me that every day was a gift from the Lord and one to be glad to face. He would say he learned how precious …
“Oh, the places you’ll go.” Dr. Seuss might have been giving a pep talk to people about to start new phases of their lives, but it would be just as easy to say this about a person entering a bookstore or a library ready to embark on a reading adventure. Today on my Facebook author’s page I shared a picture …
I’ve been giving you a behind the scenes look at how I go about beginning a new book. First I let you peek at a character sketch for my new character in Murder Is No Accident, Maggie Greene. Sunday I told you about how an old house in my town was the spark for the new mystery idea. Then a …
Often when I’m doing an interview, one of the most popular questions will be how or where do I get my ideas for stories. Sometimes the interviewer is more specific and asks where I got the idea for a particular story. That can be a hard question to answer clearly. That’s because ideas bombard an author from every direction. The …
My Hidden Springs Mystery book giveaway here on One Writer’s Journal is ongoing as an early celebration of the coming release of Hidden Springs 3, Murder Is No Accident (coming in March). That’s why I decided to take you behind the scenes and let you get a glimpse of how I get to know my characters. My grandgirl here could …