Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “One Writer’s Journal”
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 …
“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 …
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1 (New Kings James Version) I guess when you decide to write a post about the first lines of books, you can’t go completely wrong with the first line of the Bible. That line opens the door to everything that follows. God in the beginning and then wow. No …
A cat will do what it wants when it wants, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. ~Frank Perkins Are you a cat lover? If you follow my blog or join the conversation on my Facebook page, you know that I’m a dog person. That doesn’t mean I don’t like cats. It just means that dogs trump …