Trees in the Mist, photo by Leslie Budewitz I’m a big fan of the group blog Writer Unboxed, where more than 30 authors share advice on the craft and business of writing, and on motivation and inspiration. On the surface, this quote seems to speak mainly to authors of fantasy or magical novels, but I think it says more than that. It touches on a point I’ve often made here, that our work should say something true, something not immediately visible. Something you have to quiet your own mind and listen to the world to grasp, and to figure out how to express. “Where do writers get their ideas? Sure ..read more

Delighted to say that after a long wait, Carried to the Grave and Other Stories: A Food Lovers’ Village Mystery, is out in audiobook today, in all audio formats. It’s the last book in the Village series, a collection of five contemporary short stories featuring Erin and the Villagers, and a novella, “An Unholy Death,” a historical prequel set in 1910, the year Erin’s great-grandparents, Paddy and Kate Murphy, married and started the Merc in Jewel Bay, Montana. Turns out Erin may have inherited her sleuthing skills. There is one more Village short story, “The Picture of Guilt,” originally publ ..read more

“Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn’t know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future. We need that same skill as an art of survival. We need to overhear the tiny but very consequential things we say that reveal ourselves to ourselves.” – Irish poet David Whyte Novelist Paul Lynch said something similar in his PBS interview, which I quoted a few weeks ago, about the difficulty of listening to ourselves in the modern world, shaped by the noise of technology. I think the Iris ..read more

My first standalone suspense novel, BITTERROOT LAKE, written as Alicia Beckman, is a 1.99 Kindle Daily Deal today only, Wednesday, April 10. LINK From the cover: When four women separated by tragedy reunite at a lakeside Montana lodge, murder forces them to confront everything they thought they knew about the terrifying accident that tore them apart, in Agatha Award-winning author Alicia Beckman’s suspense debut. Twenty-five years ago, during a celebratory weekend at historic Whitetail Lodge, Sarah McCaskill had a vision. A dream. A nightmare. When a young man was killed, Sarah’s guilt over ha ..read more

Writers working on a mystery or thriller typically focus on the protagonist, the main character, who is often also the narrator, and sometimes a stand-in for the writer. The writer is most interested in that person, the problems they face, how they unmask the villain and save the world or their community. And too often, not enough thought goes into the villain or antagonist –– they are a foil the writer moves around the page, coming up with their motivation (if at all) as an afterthought. It’s hard, I know. Believe me, I know! So I liked this perspective: “The protagonist’s journey in both th ..read more

Agatha Awards Later this month, at Malice Domestic, the convention celebrating the traditional mystery, I’ll be moderating a conversation between the nominees for Best Contemporary Novel. I’ve been loving reading the books and thinking about what to ask. So I thought I’d bring you into the conversation, and let you meet these terrific women and their books. In Wined and Died in New Orleans, Ellen Byron’s 2d Vintage Cookbook Mystery, it’s hurricane season in New Orleans and Ricki James-Diaz is trying to shelve her fears and focus on her business, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbook and Kitchenware Sho ..read more

Jeffrey Brown : “You have written about the role of the novel today and I guess a concern about whether it can still be valued, even important, have a place in our society.” Paul Lynch: “Yes. It goes back to what I call the whisper in the ear. I mean, the novelist can whisper in the reader’s ear, and that’s a beautiful conversation. There’s also whisper in the ear that you have with yourself. But we live in a time where technology has done something to us. We are no longer, for many of us anyway — unless you cultivate it and shape it, we are not in tune with ourselves. We’re not hearing the v ..read more

“I’m interested in this idea of the personal cost of events. And I think that, if you go back through literature, you go through a great book like The Iliad, it foregrounds the politics. It foregrounds the heroics and the great characters. But if you take The Iliad and you turn it inside out, you arrive at [the protagonist of his novel, Prophet Song] Eilish Stack. You arrive at the individual living the ordinary life and how the individual is caught up within the cogs, the machinations of this enormous thing that’s unfolding. … I’m really interested in the problem of grief, not grievance. I’m ..read more

Flow. We know it when we feel it, but what is it? How can we cultivate it? A new study done at the Drexel University Creativity Research Lab used brain imaging to study jazz guitarists working on an improvisation and summarizes the results this way: “The findings reveal the creative flow state involves two key factors: extensive experience, which leads to a network of brain areas specialized for generating the desired type of ideas, plus the release of control — “letting go” — to allow this network to work with little or no conscious supervision.” I like this so much, not just ..read more

At the Pikes Peak Writers Conference last April, I met author and teacher Carly Stevens, who asked me to chat with her on YouTube about writing about the law and lawyers, as a followup to my PPWC presentation on common mistakes writers make about the law. Our conversation is now up, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. (We also talked last summer about building your characters, based on another PPWC presentation I gave, and you can watch or listen to that interview, Writing Better Characters, too.) Carly and I talked about the types of lawyers and practice, the relationships between lawy ..read more