When Callie Armstrong wrote her post on Friday about writing groups and whether to join one or not, it brought to mind a day-long, pre-convention writing workshop I attended in March before the Left Coast Crime Conference. You might want to re-read her post before going further. Oh, boy! At the workshop, there was quite …
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Author: Sharon Arthur Moore
Sharon Arthur Moore is an intrepid cook, who has lived in every region of the country except the Pacific Northwest and loved every single one of them.
Twenty Ways (and More) to Name or Not Name Your Characters
I have a dear friend and wonderful writer and critique partner who has changed all characters’ names in her WIP multiple times. All except for the real, historical people–thank goodness. Bless her heart. I am confused sometimes trying to remember if it’s George or Jim or somebody else this week. It has to be hard …
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Series Writing: Not Just One Foot after the Other
I was on a panel at this year’s Public Safety Writers Association Conference talking about issues and challenges in writing a series. As a member of the panel, I didn’t get to fully expound on any one question and, in fact, was not asked to respond to every question. There’s only so much time. As …
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“Ripped from Today’s Headline” or Where Do Writers Get Ideas
“Ripped from today’s headlines.” Remember the expression? The TV show, “Law and Order”, right? I often think of that show when people who don’t write fiction ask me where I get my ideas for stories. Where don’t I get ideas? They beat me about the head until I capture the idea in a computer file …
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The Mystery of Mysteries, Part I
If you search for “how to write a mystery”, 43,900,000 links pop up. It’s no mystery then to conclude that lots of people write about writing mysteries. Maybe there are so many links because there are so many kinds of mysteries. Maybe there are so many links because more people write about writing mysteries …
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Your Business Card: Valuable Real Estate
We all have them. Business cards, that is. Writers probably spent a combined time, across all of our efforts creating them, that would have equaled the time to pen an epic tome. You know what I mean. Which layout design? What picture? Font style and size? Oh, and the info to include in those few …
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Romancing the Genre
I am co-authoring this post today with one of my alter egos, Angelica French. Angelica writes romances of varying degrees of heat. (I have another alter ego, River Glynn. River writes paranormal, science fiction, and fantasy.) The fourth Tuesday of each month I’ll post about issues in romance, writing romances, or provide general information like …
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Five Ways to Get to Know Your Characters
I took classical Greek in college. I loved it, sort of like doing word puzzles. What letter is this squiggle, what is the meaning of that series of squiggles? One thing I learned was that spacing between words and punctuation were relatively modern conventions meant to make literacy more accessible for larger numbers of people. …
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Nancy Drew: Detective…and Writing Teacher?
I was hooked on mysteries with my first Nancy Drew (Carolyn Keene). Who wouldn’t want to be her, zipping around in her little red car with her girlfriend, George, and boyfriend, Ned? She was intrepid, daring, smart, and very independent. In the 1950s, when I was reading Nancy Drew books, there weren’t many examples for …
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Spring Cleaning the Writer’s Mind
Here in Arizona, spring isn’t as well-defined as it might be in your part of the world. Here, we call it spring when our temps get above the average 70 degrees of winter. For those three days, before the 100s begin, we have a version of spring. (Only kidding about the three days. Lots of …
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