Q: Do you have favorite craft sessions, or articles/books on craft that you return to for inspiration or help? A: Craft questions often come down to how-to questions. I’ve spent much of my life thinking about creative processes in one way or another. There are many good books on the writing life, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, are the first to come to mind. I have collected stacks of how-to books on writing, Zen meditation, sobriety, and conquering depression. Many I haven't finished, some I n ..read more

Do you have favorite craft sessions, or articles/books on craft that you return to for inspiration or help? This week’s topic is tricky for me because the simple answer would be to write No and then end it there.  I’m certainly not going to say I am self-taught. I have taken English classes in school, screenwriting classes in college. Never a novel writing class, nor have I bought any guide books or craft books beyond Strunk and White and I still have to refer to it when I come across Farther and Further.  I can’t say I’m self taught because I learned and continue to learn a great d ..read more

  Do you have favorite craft sessions, or articles/books on craft that you return to for inspiration or help? I have never attended a craft session, nor have I paid much attention to either articles or books on craft. Please let me explain. I have read articles by writer friends. This blog is an example. I have visited Career Authors and Jungle Red Writers, but I read for perspective not advice. I equate books on craft with How To books, a manifestation of Self-Help books, which I find perversely strange. Okay, I hear the counterargument. You read X to learn Y that you don’t know how to ..read more

 Q: Do you have favorite craft sessions, or articles/books on craft that you return to for inspiration or help? -from Susan   At Left Coast Crime last week, a talented writer told me that something I said set her on a new and exciting fictional path. When she told me what resonated so much, it was something quite simple, nothing that I had polished or that I felt was original. It made me think, and it’s relevant to this week’s question.   You can hear the same message a hundred times and it runs right past you. At a specific moment in time, however, the gates to your mind open a ..read more

What would make you quit writing? Age? Infirmity? Lack of what you consider success? Boredom? Something else? My fellow '7 Minds' authors, Brenda, Terry and Dietrich, have already responded to this week's prompt - and I was struck by the fact that everyone plans to carry on writing until they absolutely can't. We are all writers because we must, because their is a worm of compulsion that burrows its way into our mind and screams at us, "Write!" - that forces us out of bed at midnight, keeps us up till the late hours when the family is asleep and the road outside is lonely, empty - gets us out ..read more

Today, our guest post is from Kim Hays, a crime fiction author on the rise. She writes the gripping Polizei Bern procedural series, featuring Swiss cops Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatello. It’s one of the best detective series you’ll ever read. The setting is fresh and engaging, the themes current and relevant, and the rich ensemble cast of characters shines, especially Giuliana and Renato. Never far from boiling over, their mutual attraction simmers restlessly throughout the series, adding spice and nuance to their complex working relationship.  Here’s what I thought of the first book i ..read more

What would make you quit writing? Age? Infirmity? Lack of what you consider success? Boredom? Something else? by Dietrich Death. To put it another way, I’m planning for the long haul, so I tell myself the best is yet to come. And that’s easy to do when I think of the many greats who did their best work late in life — take George Orwell and Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Okay, he was on his deathbed, but he was around long enough to see his masterpiece published and rise to critical acclaim. In spite of a wealth of talent, Cormac McCarthy saw little success from his early writing. In fact he was sixt ..read more

  Terry here, with the answer to the burning question:   What would make you quit writing? Age? Infirmity? Lack of what you consider success? Boredom? Something else?   I’ve often said that doctors will be ready to pull the plug on me, and I’ll yell, “Wait. Let me finish this paragraph.”   I guess that means the short answer is “nothing will make me quit writing.” I wrote before I ever had thoughts of being published. I’d write short stories or descriptions or scenes. It was my way of thinking. And sometimes my way of relaxing. I never was successful at ke ..read more

  Thank you, Josh, for the opportunity to write this. The only thing more surprising to me than Josh liking a contemporary YA fantasy is that I wrote one. And here's the story of how that happened. My latest book almost didn't happen because of the pandemic, and then only happened because of the pandemic. One of my friends and literary heroes is Lawrence Block, who has written books while on cruise ships, so I decided that my next book would be written while I embarked upon a grand circuit of the United States by rail. (You see where this is going, don't you?) I even asked ol' LB for ad ..read more

  I just found out that Publishers Weekly has let go of some its reviewers and is reviewing fewer mysteries. PW is one of the top reviewers. Which reviewers will take their place? Kirkus? Booklist? Library Journal? Or maybe some of the private reviewers. Do reviews matter to you? Do you think they influence readers? Who do you count on for reviews and why?   Reviews matter, and then they don’t.   The question is whether the reason you’re reading reviews is personal or business.   As writers, we all crave some form of validation that our efforts are not for naught. We hope ..read more