When my co-author, Amanda Capper, and I first began writing A Fatal Affair: The Murder of Helen Grier in October 2025, I decided to create dedicated Facebook and Instagram accounts and post something about the book on a weekly basis. (I tried BlueSky for a while as well, but abandoned that after a few months […]
Here’s the truth: Good book covers help to sell books. Not-so-good book covers don’t. Of course, what constitutes a good or not-so-good book cover is largely dependent on the genre, and in the case of mystery, the sub-genre. With my upcoming release, A FATAL AFFAIR: THE MURDER OF HELEN GRIER, I was faced with more than […]
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: unless you’re young and dewy-eyed OR spectacularly gorgeous, most female authors approach getting new professional author photos with the same dread that might be reserved for bathing suit shopping (I can’t speak for male authors vis-a-vis bathing suit shopping, so I’m not even going to […]
I first wrote about A Fatal Affair: The Murder of Helen Grier in my January first Monday post (if you missed it, you can find it here). Since that time, my co-author, Amanda Capper, and I have continued our research. Much of that research is about the police investigation, the events leading up to the […]
A couple of months ago, I was approached by Barbara Bos of Women Writers, Women’s Books. She introduced herself by saying she’d learned about me from following The Stiletto Gang and wondered if I’d like to share my backstory to becoming a published author. I’ll admit to being suspicious. I’ve had “offers” from big name […]
Visiting us today is bestselling author Susan Van Kirk. Susan and I were first introduced to one another by Lourdes Venard of Comma Sense Editing. This would have been in 2013, maybe 2014. Both Susan and I had written first manuscripts and we were filled with dreams of eventual publication for our cozy masterpieces. The […]
It’s June and that means it’s time for another Stiletto Gang multi-author e-book #giveaway. That might sound simple on the surface, but most (if not all) of us have authored multiple books. Deciding which book to giveaway is step 1 in the process. Step 2 is a bit of shameless self promotion for the promotion […]
It’s hard to believe, but come July 2026 it will be 12 years since I signed a contract to publish my debut novel. Traditional publishing can be slow, and it was a full year (July 2015) when The Hanged Man’s Noose was released by Mystery Writer of America-approved publisher Barking Rain Press. If you had […]
AUTHORS HELPING AUTHORS I’d been published a little over a year, maybe two, when I first met Emily Wood. I’d been approached by a regional library to talk about writing and getting published. As I recall, it was loosely related to the now defunct National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) held each November. Anyway, Emily was […]
The Last Detail is the title of a short story, written by me and recently published by Brown Hound Press. A new online publisher, Brown Hound is a small press based in Lexington, Kentucky that publishes offbeat mystery, dark humor, southern gothic, and literary fiction. Brown Hound Press plans to publish one short story a […]