Monthly Archives: July 2021

The whodunit I’m developing has a couple of elements that tag it as part of the cozy sub-genre within the mystery genre — a small, picturesque New England town and an amateur sleuth. It has, however, a narrator who is … Continue reading →

The mystery novel I’m working on has certain cozyish elements, so I picked up a Kindle copy of Nancy Cohen’s Writing the Cozy Mystery. One of the things I like about this book is that it’s not a how-to-write book. … Continue reading →

Erle Stanley Gardner is my favorite bad writer. He’s most famous for his Perry Mason mysteries, which were made into a successful TV series. Gardner’s characters are cardboard and his plots are often riddled with absurdities. His prose never rises … Continue reading →

There’s an old anecdote, dating back probably to the 1940s, about a fan asking a science fiction writer, “Where do you get your ideas?” The writer replies, “Well, see, there’s this post office box in Schenectady, New York. You send … Continue reading →

Finished a major project. (It’s finished, trust me. No more revisions, not unless a publisher who is paying me requests them.) Wondering what I might want to write next. Lots of ideas, of course; ideas are cheap and plentiful. But … Continue reading →

This afternoon, while watching the plumbers install a new toilet, I was standing near my shelf of how-to-write books. On impulse I pulled out Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. I had bought this fat scholarly treatise a few years … Continue reading →