By Lois Winston Someone recently asked me which author would I most want to take a master class from? Hmm…here’s the thing: I don’t get much out of long workshops. I find that an hour is my limit. Maybe I have too short an attention span, but I find that after an hour, my mind […]
By Lois Winston As authors, we spend much of our days in our writer caves. Sometimes, we rarely leave the house for days as we peck away at the keyboard, increasing our word count. Living life in a vacuum is hard, though. Sometimes we need to bounce ideas off someone, and let’s face it, kids […]
By Lois Winston I don’t like change. I much prefer the security and comfort of habit. I’m not the kind of person who climbs a mountain just because it’s there. I need a reason to step out of my comfort zone, lace up my hiking boots, and ascend into the unknown. When I’m confronted with […]
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about how subjective taste is. What makes one person love something that another person has a hard time swallowing, let alone enjoying? The other night my husband and I sat down to watch a movie. After fifteen minutes he left the room to watch a hockey game on […]
By Lois Winston Triskaidekaphobia is defined as the fear or avoidance of the number thirteen. There are some people so paranoid about the number that they won’t live on the thirteenth floor of a building. Many hotels completely skip the thirteenth floor, going from the twelfth to the fourteenth because people will often refuse to […]
The other day, I had reached a point in my current manuscript, the 13th book in my Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery Series, that had me stymied. I was more than two-thirds toward writing “The End.” I knew that I was at the point where I needed to return to one of the red herring threads […]
By Lois Winston Every author has her own process. What works for one of us doesn’t work for all of us. Some authors are diehard plotters who create extensive outlines before ever committing that first sentence to paper (or in most cases, to keyboard.) Some are known as “pantsers,” authors who write by the seat […]
By Lois Winston Many authors mention in their bios that they always wanted to be a writer. Not me. I wanted to be an astronaut. That dream died a quick death due to a right brain that quakes at the sight of anything requiring math skills and a body prone to motion sickness. Some dreams […]
By Lois Winston I’ve recently had several requests from authors and publishers to write blurbs for soon-to-be-published books. In addition, I’m currently judging a writing contest for recently published novels. Although all mysteries, these books run the gamut of various sub-genres within mystery, everything from cozies to suspense. Disturbingly, I’m seeing one issue that crops […]
By Lois Winston One day when my oldest son was two years old, I was singing to him in the car when he covered his ears with his hands and cried, “Stop singing, Mommy. You’re hurting my ears.” It turns out he was born with perfect pitch, while I was saddled with two tin ears. […]