Guest Mystery Author – CB Wilson

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Today we welcome guest mystery author CB Wilson to the Stiletto Gang.

Author CB Wilson and Glimmer at the Hôtel de Glace

Author CB Wilson and Glimmer at the Hôtel de Glace

The Things We Do for a Good Murder

By CB Wilson

People often ask where I get my mystery ideas. The answer? Everywhere. Especially places I probably shouldn’t visit. I love traveling to the locations where I set my books. Sure, Google can tell me what a building looks like, how old it is, and maybe even where the bodies are buried. But it can’t tell me what it feels like to stand there.

Case in point: Québec City, Canada. Setting The Ice Diamond, my third Gem Hunters Mystery, in Québec City seemed brilliant. A stolen fifteen-carat diamond. A murder inside the famous Hôtel de Glace, a hotel built entirely of ice and snow. Centuries-old buildings, cobblestone streets, and secrets begging to be uncovered.

One tiny problem: I hate the cold. I live in Arizona for a reason. My idea of winter involves sunshine and perhaps a sweater if temperatures dip below seventy.

Nevertheless, I packed my warmest clothes and headed to Québec City in early March. Only my diamond detective, Taylor Hunter, and her diamond-sniffing dachshund, Glimmer, hate the cold more than I do. At least Glimmer gets a pink puffy jacket and matching boots.

The moment I stepped outside, Québec’s icy wind stole my breath. Every step across those treacherous cobblestones threatened to land me flat on my backside.

But oh, what a fabulous place for a murder!

After exploring the magnificent Château Frontenac, I ventured into the Hôtel de Glace. And yes, I actually spent the night there. Buried inside a mummy sleeping bag, I questioned my sanity.

Then something happened. The translucent ice walls shimmered in the eerie light. Shadows shifted. Every creak made me listen harder. Was that a footstep? A whisper? Suddenly, I imagined a priceless diamond vanishing, a killer slipping through the shadows, and Hunter trapped where one wrong move could be deadly.

Delirious? Possibly. But the story was coming alive around me.

Fortunately, research wasn’t all murder and mischief. I discovered Café à l’Érable, Québec’s heavenly maple coffee, laced with Canadian whisky, maple syrup, and cream. Heaven in a cup when you can’t feel your toes.

That’s what traveling gives me as a mystery author. Not just facts. Feelings.

And that’s exactly what I want to share with you. So grab a blanket, pour yourself something warm, and join Hunter and Glimmer in The Ice Diamond. Wander the snowy streets of Old Québec, step inside the breathtaking Hôtel de Glace, and discover what happens when a fifteen-carat diamond vanishes and a killer turns a winter wonderland into a deadly game. Just remember, beneath all that glittering ice, someone has something to hide.

If you find yourself shivering, glancing over your shoulder, or wondering whom to trust, I’ll consider my research a success.

As for me? I’m back in sunny Arizona, where the only ice I want is floating in my cocktail. But apparently, I haven’t learned my lesson.

Next stop? St. Charles, Missouri, for its famous Christmas Traditions festival, the setting for The Christmas Diamond. Victorian characters, twinkling lights, holiday cheer—and murder.

Yep. Back to the frozen tundra. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. But what’s a little frostbite when there’s a diamond to steal and a murder to solve?

The Ice Diamond

A Gem Hunters Mystery, Book 3

Every diamond has a story… This one is colder than betrayal 

Taylor Hunter has tracked stolen gems across the globe. She knows thieves, cons, and impossible heists. But she’s never faced a theft from a locked room carved entirely from ice.

When the priceless Ice Diamond vanishes during a glittering gala at Québec City’s legendary Hôtel de Glace, Hunter expects a brilliant jewel thief. What she gets is murder, an Olympic “Ice Princess” with a dangerous secret, and clues that point disturbingly close to home.

Luckily, Hunter has Glimmer—a diamond-sniffing dachshund with a genius nose for precious gems and an unfortunate talent for finding trouble.

Together, they race through the frozen streets of Old Québec and follow a trail of clues into an icy labyrinth where someone has been hiding the truth for decades.

Recover the diamond. Catch the killer.

Easy. Except when your father is one of the world’s most notorious jewel thieves, nothing is ever simple.

Buy Links

https://books2read.com/theicediamond

https://mybook.to/theicediamond

~*~

Award-winning mystery author CB Wilson writes the Gem Hunters and the Barkview Mysteries—two series that blend intrigue, heart, and unforgettable animal companions. A GIA-trained gemologist, she brings authenticity and insider detail to her fast-paced stories of stolen jewels, hidden histories, and high-stakes recovery.

Her Gem Hunters series follows diamond recovery specialist Taylor “Hunter” and her diamond-sniffing dachshund, Glimmer, as they unravel mysteries spanning generations. The series includes The Fire Diamond, The Water Diamond, The Ice Diamond, and The Christmas Diamond. (Part of the Christmas Traditions & Wagging Tails collection)

CB’s Barkview Mysteries offer a Hallmark-style escape to the dog-friendliest town in America, where mysteries and canine companions go paw in paw.

Learn more about CB and her books at her website, where you’ll also find links to her other social media.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

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The Lost Art of Letter Writing: When was the last time you wrote a letter, or received one?

With texting, email, and Facebook messaging as popular (and expedient) forms of communication, people rarely write letters today. Why bother, you might ask? I was fortunate to have had a friend who preferred to communicate this old-fashioned way. We met several years ago when I interviewed her for a book I was writing about her father. Although she used email, she did so mainly for business. We chatted on the phone, but we also wrote letters to one another. I have kept every letter she wrote me, as well as copies of those I wrote to her.

I think letter writing is rare because it takes time and effort.

Getting started is especially hard. I could begin with a comment on the weather, how I’m feeling, or what I’ve been up to, but those topics seem humdrum. What helped me get past “Dear Alice,” was a reminder to start with a quirky thought that’s been brewing in my brain—something like why I choose two olives with my martini one night and three the next. Or whine about an annoying neighbor who reads her mail in her car while parked next to my bedroom, listening to loud music. After that first paragraph, I’m off and running, pounding out three or four pages in a few minutes.

Electronic communication fosters little forethought as to what to say, or how to say it.

“I have a question; here it is.” Or, “I have some information you need; read this quickly.” I also find that when I send an email with too many questions, most go unanswered. No one seems to have the patience to read lengthy emails. I once had a publisher who consistently ignored most of what I asked. I soon learned to ask just one question per email.

Letter writing, on the other hand, takes thought, creativity, and consideration for the recipients.

You don’t want to bore your recipients with mundane information. You want to make them laugh, share the quirky thoughts going on in your head and your life. I look back on the first letters I wrote to my friend; most contained questions about her father’s activities. But after my book was published, The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story, Alice Allen and I  began communicating on a more personal level, and a true friendship developed. I enjoyed reading her letters, holding them, and carrying them in my purse so I could reread them later. I knew she put time and effort into her letters to me—and that made me feel special. I hope she felt the same way when she received one of mine. When the pandemic struck six years ago, I could no longer visit a close friend because she was sequestered in the home of an elderly lady, who was also a friend, whom she was caring for. I started writing them letters to cheer them up and bring some light to their isolated world.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with all of Alice Allen’s letters, but I’m glad I kept them. My friend passed away almost three years ago, but rereading her letters allows me to feel her presence.

Kathleen Kaska writes the award-winning Sydney Lockhart Mystery Series set in the 1950s and the Kate Caraway Animal-Rights Mystery Series. She also writes mystery trivia, including The Sherlock Holmes Quiz Book. Her Holmes short story, “The Adventure at Old Basingstoke,” appears in Sherlock Holmes of Baking Street. She founded The Dogs in the Nighttime, a scion of The Baker Street Irregulars.

Artificial Intelligence, a Friend… or a Foe?

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by Gay Yellen

Recently, our local newspaper devoted an entire page of articles with disturbing headlines on the subject. The lead essay announced this: AI-HUMAN HYBRID EYED TO PREVENT ROGUE AI. My mind’s eye instantly conjured up the scary image of a human-robot cyborg. Hard to say what form it might actually take, but there’s no comfort in this quote from a co-founder of the tech start-up behind the idea: “I think we still have a lot to learn from humans.” Gee, thanks.

The second headline felt like a slap in the face:

AI COMPANIES DESTROYING MORE BOOKS THAN YOU THINK. People who write for a living are painfully aware of the literary larceny perpetrated by e-book pirate sites that secretly clone our books for their own profit. But this topic goes beyond the personal.

Scott Brown, a seller of rare books in Portland, Oregon, is up in arms against AI companies that slice off a book’s bindings before scanning the pages and dumping what’s left. The majority of those tomes may result from the glut of over-ordered, unsold “best-sellers,” but too often, rare books are also turned into mulch, despite alternate scanning methods that do not harm the original. I’m currently researching a subject that reaches back centuries, and it’s already hard enough to find original accounts from those years. The thought of losing even one rare resource is… well, I don’t want to think about it.

Old-fashioned copycat plagiarism still happens, too.

It happened to me when I was the editor of a national monthly magazine. The perpetrator was a freelancer from Australia who was looking for assignments in the U.S. He dropped off a few work samples with his resume and asked to return the next day to see if I would hire him.

Looking through his material, I spied an article on a topic I’d covered months earlier, so I pulled that one out to read first. By the end of the second paragraph, the words seemed eerily familiar. Long story short, he had blatantly copied—word for word and comma for comma—a piece I’d written for an issue we’d published months before. The only difference was his name in the byline instead of mine.

Now that literary larceny has gone digital, it’s much more common. Thank goodness for sites like Writer Beware and professional groups like The Authors Guild and Sisters in Crime to spread the word to help writers fend the off the hoodlums.

We’re told that AI benefits myriad of professions, and it’s true. Even for a writer, it’s useful for quick fact-checking. But too often, the information it spits out is just plain wrong.

I’ve heard that some publishers use AI to flag the increasing number of bot-written submissions in their over-burdened slush piles. Sounds good. But apparently, an AI weed-eater cannot always distinguish between AI-slop and a truly original manuscript from a human author. It is known to have flagged a legitimate writer’s work for using an em-dash instead of a period or a comma or some other grammatical styling. Almost every author I know employs an em-dash when it’s needed, including me.

Distractions like these can seep into the creative process, leading some authors to second-guess their choices at every turn. Currently, my focus is on the way-back-when, and I rely on sources from centuries ago. Instead of leading me to a list of possible sources, the web often offers up AI summaries in reply to my query. And too often, the bot gets it wrong.

Will human creativity be erased from history?

Will the same happen to humans? An article in the New Yorker some months back contained this quote from the Nobel prize-winning “godfather” of AI, Geoffrey Hinton. “Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to want to kill you when it grows up, you should worry.”

So, will AI be a benefit to humankind, or be a threat to our existence?

 Gay Yellen’s award-winning writing career began in magazine journalism. She also was the contributing editor for the international thriller, Five Minutes to Midnight (Delacorte), which debuted as a New York Times “Notable.” Her Samantha Newman Mystery Series is packed with suspense and laced with touches of romance, heart, and humor. On Amazon , or to order from your favorite bookseller.

Summer Vibes

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Don’t Leave Your Readers Fragmented

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Authors Note: I’ve been busy doing beta reads and the subject of fragmented sentences came up. I wrote the following article in 2013 while editing Writing from the Peak, Pikes Peak Writers blog. I didn’t update the original because dated as it is, I still think it has relevance in 2026. See if you don’t agree. ~ Donnell 

Fragmented sentences have left me feeling fragmented of late.

Writing is all about feeling. If you write a story, the number one thing you must be concerned about is not perfect sentence structure, not whether your plot is the most brilliant ever, and not even whether the characters are quirky and out there. The number one thing writers must be concerned with when adding words to the page is how am I making my reader feel?

Feelings are why readers continue to read – not because you’ve written the best book ever, and not because you’re the next Gillian Flynn or Charles Dickens. You’ve grabbed your reader, done something to their heart and they’ve become invested in your story.

That being said, authors have a tendency to glom on to whatever works. Whether I’m judging a contest or reading a book of one of my peers or my favorite NY Times bestseller, as a writer I can’t help but notice when something trends. Books are a lot like Twitter. Authors find out what they perceive as hot, and make an unconscious decision–or perhaps conscious–to implement that trend in their next book.

One of my earliest critique partners, Colonel Jim Roper (ret.), gave me some advice that I’ve never forgotten. He said, “Find your own voice.” That advice truly resonated with me, and from that point on, I’ve done my best not to copy other writers. True, we choose a genre that we prefer, but if someone starts a style all his own and the next twenty writers jump on the “Me Too” bandwagon, that kind of dilutes his style, doesn’t it?

Example: I don’t know what writer came up with using the period for emphasis. Because I mainly read mysteries and suspense, every so often I’d see a writer use something like: He had to stop him. Couldn’t. Let. That. Happen. The first few times, placing a period after a word might have been effective. Incorporated into every other book, however, the style became redundant. Interestingly enough, I’m not seeing it used much these days.

The redundancy issue brings me to the topic of this blog and why I’m feeling fragmented. Some authors are using fragmented sentences every other sentence. And the fact that they’re not completing sentences leaves Me. Slightly. Yanked. Out. Of the story.

There are tricks that writers use to increase the pacing of a manuscript. If you’re writing an action scene, and you want to pick up the pace, shorten your sentences. If you want to slow the pace, lengthen your sentences so that your reader will take a breath. I’ve read that something in the brain is triggered when sentence structure is varied. But if you’re fragmenting your sentences because you think it ups the excitement or makes you a more compelling writer, consider changing what I personally feel is an ineffective style and an overused trend.

Am I saying never use a fragmented sentence? Absolutely not (there – feel better?)  All I ask is that when you do write a fragmented sentence, you’re doing so deliberately and not because you think it elevates the scene. Words are tools; writers are the tradesmen. Every word in your manuscript belongs to you. Don’t leave your sentences or your readers fragmented. Remember, we readers have feelings.

About the Author: Donnell Ann Bell is an award-winning author whose romantic suspense novels have reached Amazon’s Bestseller list. Her Cold Case Suspense series also received accolades, including a 2020 Colorado Book Award nomination for Black Pearl: A Cold Case Suspense and in 2023, Best Thriller in the Imadjinn Awards, Imaginarium Celebration in Louisville, Kentucky for Until Dead: A Cold Case Suspense. Before turning to fiction, she edited for The Colorado Springs Business Journal and Pikes Peak Parent newsmagazine. Her website is www.donnellannbell.net

The Devil’s in the Details

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Even though we write fiction, authenticity matters. It’s the details that make our stories authentic and create an immersive world for the reader. As a crime fiction writer of a series that is legal adjacent, I believe my responsibility is to get the details correct.

My second book has a scene involving a corrections officer and an in-person family visit with an inmate. This scene was necessary to establish relationships that were key to the plot. While I’d been inside that particular jail many times in the past as an attorney, I’ve never been there as a visitor.

Like most authors today, my first stop was the internet. I was dismayed to discover that family and friends could only have remote video visits. Well, that wasn’t going to work. That had to be wrong.

TAIT Radio with BOB

I called the jail directly, not expecting to get anywhere. After numerous transfers, I finally connected with a counselor who was willing to speak with me. No, the only in-person visits were on special holidays such as Christmas or Father’s Day. Worse yet, these visits were in a group setting. It looked like I had to go back to the drawing board.

Then the counselor asked why I wanted to know. I explained I was an author writing crime fiction— a fact they could verify since my name appeared on their caller id—and described the scene.

The counselor spoke to another person in the room. After a brief consultation, the other person, who was in charge, got on the phone. “You’d have to put in a motion and get a court order. Then we’d arrange a contact visit.” She laughed. “But you’d have to find a judge that would do that.”

Since I had a fictional judge in my fictional pocket, that wouldn’t be a problem. I thanked the counselors profusely for solving my plot problem.

Close-up of BOB

My scene also required the corrections officer to leave the room when an incident occurred in the jail. In the first draft, a radio squawked out a code. Something about that scenario didn’t feel right, so I decided to call a lifeline — my neighbor, Tom, whose company provides radio systems to prisons and jails.

Just like the counselors, Tom was glad to help. He brought over a demo radio. When I described the scene, he immediately disabused me of codes and messages that inmates can hear. I learned that guards carry their radio in a leather holster on their duty belt along with two sets of cuffs and a couple cans of CS spray, a.k.a. tear gas. A speaker mic, connected by a curly cord resembling an old telephone cord to the radio, clips on the guard’s collar. The guards listen to the radio through a corded earpiece that could be stored in the speaker mic.

These radios are more than glorified walkie-talkies. Each one has a screen that displays a unique id such as a badge number or an officer’s call sign. The radios have accelerometers much like the Apple watch feature that detects a fall. If the radio accelerates, goes on its side, or is in a horizontal position, a “man-down” is issued. If an incident occurs, the guard pushes BOB (Big Orange Button) located on the speaker mic. If BOB is held down for three seconds, an emergency is broadcast.

Wow! Did I have a wrong detail in my jail scene! A small detail, but nonetheless, an important one for authenticity. Armed with my new information, I fixed my faux pas.

I learned a valuable lesson. Research on the internet doesn’t always deliver the goods. Whenever possible, seek out a person with the right experience.

And don’t be afraid to ask.

Grammar Crimes

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By Lois Winston

Like Henry Higgins, grammar crimes make me cringe. I’m sure you remember his immortal words: “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” He then went on to add, “In America, they haven’t spoken it in years.” He wasn’t wrong.

Grammar Crimes

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Grammar Crimes

Thanks to my junior high school English teacher, I suffer from a multitude of grammar pet peeves. Throughout seventh and eighth grade, Peggy Riley Hughes drummed grammar into me. Since then, poor grammar, whether written or spoken, makes me cringe. I can’t help it. Those rules were burned into my brain.

Split Logs, not Infinitives

To boldly go where no man has gone before. Remember that opening from Star Trek? Cringe-worthy! Gene Rodenberry obviously didn’t have Peggy Riley Hughes as an English teacher. If he had, he never would have split his infinitive.

Sadly, the Oxford English Dictionary did the unthinkable years ago and declared that it’s now okay to split infinitives. It’s no longer a grammar crime. The horror! Poor Peggy! At least she didn’t live long enough to experience such a crime.

License to Take Liberties

As authors, we have license to take liberties with our writing. For instance, when I write dialogue, I don’t necessarily write in perfectly formed sentences because people rarely speak in perfectly formed sentences. We speak in sentence fragments. So do our characters, but that’s okay. We want our characters to sound real, not stilted.

Style often dictates that sentence fragments also be used in narrative, depending on the genre, the plot, the era, and the characters populating our novel. Again, that’s perfectly acceptable.

If you Break it, Own it

Deliberately committing a grammar crime is okay if there’s a reason for doing so. The foremost reason is to keep your characters believable. “Me and him were late for school.” works if the dialog is spoken by a young child or in narrative, if you’re writing the scene from the child’s point of view. It would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb if spoken by a college professor.

Breaking this Rule Doesn’t Make You Sound More Intelligent

The grammar crime that makes me cringe the most, though, is the misuse of pronouns. For some reason, even very well-educated people constantly misuse pronouns, substituting “I” for “me” because they think using the nominative case for the objective case sounds more intelligent.

There are Three Types of Pronouns

Nominative: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, and who

Objective: me, you, him, her, it, us, them, and whom

Possessive: my, your, yours, his, her, hers, its, our, ours, their, theirs, and whose

The nominative form is used when the pronoun is the subject of a sentence. The objective form is used when the pronoun is the direct object of the sentence or is part of a prepositional phrase.

WRONG: He invited Mary and I.

RIGHT: He invited Mary and me.

WRONG: The coach had to choose between Mary and I.

RIGHT: The coach had to choose between Mary and me.

Hopefully, the OED won’t someday decide that it’s perfectly acceptable to replace the objective with the nominative. “He invited I.” “He sat opposite I.” “The coach chose I.” Holy cringe-worthy grammar crime! 😵‍💫

However, because we’re dealing with English, there’s an exception to this grammar rule. Because in English, it seems there’s always an exception to just about every rule. In this case, it’s the “to be” verbs, also known as “linking verbs.” When using am, is, are, was, were, or be, you use the nominative form of the pronoun for the direct object, not the objective.

WRONG: It was him.

RIGHT: It was he.

WRONG: It’s me.

RIGHT: It’s I.

If you’re now thoroughly confused, you’re not alone.

Never the Both of Us

Finally, there are many grammar rules I remember from my junior high days and know not to break, but I don’t remember the reason for the rule. For example, it’s either “the two of us” or “both of us” but never “the both of us.” Don’t ask me why. I forgot the reason for that grammar rule many decades ago, if there ever was a logical reason. It’s quite possible that just for fun, some grammarian at Oxford or Cambridge decided to make life and the English language more confusing for all of us. After all, they didn’t have TV, the Internet, or video games back then. They had to get their amusement from somewhere.

Do you have a grammar pet peeve? Post a comment for a chance to win a promo code for a free audiobook download of any of the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries or Empty Nest Mysteries.

~*~

USA Today and Amazon bestselling and award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, children’s chapter books, and nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” In addition, Lois is a former literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. Learn more about Lois and her books at her website www.loiswinston.com. Sign up for her newsletter to receive an Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mini-Mystery.

Country Music and Truth

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by Paula Gail Benson

As Killer Nashville approaches at the end of August, I’ve been binge watching Nashville, the musical/soap opera drama TV series that aired on ABC from 2012 until 2016 and on CMT from 2016 to 2018. It’s now available to view on Netflix.

From the beginning, the episodes chronicle the careers of Rayna Jaymes (played by Connie Britton), an established country star trying to maintain and improve her place in the industry, and Juliette Barnes (played by Hayden Panettiere), a newcomer ready to take Rayna’s place as the Queen of Country Music. An interesting dynamic between these characters that helps to showcase locations in Nashville is that Rayna comes from “old money” and had to leave her wealthy home at sixteen to pursue music. Through her eyes and her family’s activities, viewers see the symphony, political events, Vanderbilt University and Hospital, and private schools. In contrast, Juliette was raised by an addicted mother in a trailer park. Her experience has hardened her from beyond scrappy to mean and vindictive. She confronts a lot of trouble, most of it arising from her own actions.

Both have frequented the Bluebird Café, a small restaurant/performance venue in a strip mall that opened in 1982 and has become a mecca for established and aspiring song writers. I think the series made it look a lot easier to get a seat or a place on stage at the Bluebird than it actually is.

The show has been praised because it features music as much as drama. The actors sang the songs they performed and some of them have gone on from the series to develop musical careers.

During one trip to Nashville, I met a young Uber driver who worked to transport actors and crew to the locations. It was interesting to hear how Nashville embraced the series. The driver had made enough from the work to take a trip to Europe. A great return.

My parents met in Nashville. Seeing the Ryman Auditorium and the Grand Ole Opry (which I attended with Debra Goldstein to see Garth Brooks) have special meaning to me.

What I’ve particularly enjoyed is how the series depicts the unseen aspects of the music industry, especially what it’s like to write a song. There are lots of scenes where people try composing alone, then turn to work with others to come up with lyrics and tunes. New artists are encouraged to draw upon their own experiences, to describe situations that touch them personally.

The personal connection is a strong identifier with the musicians depicted on Nashville. I know that fiction authors don’t always tell stories based on their own lives or experiences, but many do feel it’s important to keep faith with their readers by maintaining certain elements. I pondered on that as I watched Nashville and saw how language and brands were carefully chosen and protected. Maybe that’s why it is so important to write from a place and about a situation that truly resonates with you. I think that’s what Nashville is trying to tell us: being true to yourself is a quality that readers and fans appreciate and respect.

I hope you will have the chance to experience Nashville in person. It has its own special magic.

photo of donalee Moulton

A question or two about writing

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by donalee Moulton

A new book means new opportunities to talk about writing. Here are a few questions I’ve been asked as Cardinal takes flight. 

What was the most difficult piece you ever wrote? What made it difficult?
I wrote an article early in my career about an infant born several months prematurely (with only a tablespoon of blood in its entire body if I remember correctly) and the fight to save the little one. I recall drafting the article with tears streaming down my cheeks. In that moment I realized, for me, that journalism was about moving people as well as informing them.

What sort of research do you do for your work?
Research is essential, even when you think you won’t need to do a lot of it. For example, there were key elements to my first mystery book Hung Out to Die that had to be authentic, at least in a fictional context. I had done a lot of reporting on the cannabis industry and had the opportunity to tour a cannabis-production plant before it opened. Likewise, for years as a freelance journalist, I wrote on the health sector and health issues, including mental health and personality issues. As a communications specialist, many of my clients were from this sector. All of this research knowingly and unknowingly fed into Hung Out to Die.

Which books and authors do you read for pleasure? Is there an author that inspires you?
I relish reading. I was a judge in the Crime Writers of Canada’s Awards of Excellence this year, and I got to dive into fabulous – and very diverse – books that kept me on my toes and my eyes glued to the page. When I was younger and I was discovering the wonder and wow of the mystery genre, I devoured authors like Tony Hillerman, Martha Grimes, Ruth Rendell. More recently I have discovered writers like Richard Osman. And Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing was nothing short of joyous.

Was there a person who encouraged you to write?
My mother taught me to love language – and to respect it. She cared about words and getting the words right. She was my greatest influence.

What would you say are your strengths as an author?
I always find it easy to get distracted when I am writing. As a freelance journalist, however, I learned to stay on track. Working to deadline meant there often wasn’t time to travel down interesting but non-essential paths. You are also working to a specific word count as a journalist so you know no matter how interesting the asides, they will not make it into the article for length reasons. Rigor is required.

How often do you write, and do you write using a strict routine?
I am not a marathon writer. I am a sprinter. I can’t sit and write for hours at a time. I break up my writing by taking a yoga class, soaking up some sunshine, checking email, doing some paid work. I do try to write 1,000 fictional words a day. Some days I achieve this. We don’t need to talk about the other days.

Sci-Fi Blurb Leads to Fascination with the Author

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When a headline popped up in my feed two months ago, I did something I rarely do. I immediately clicked on. I was intrigued by the title, The Girl Who was Plugged In.

My plan was simply to explain the gist of the 1973 science fiction novella about a disabled fifteen-year-old girl who agrees to remotely control a genetically engineered fifteen-year-old girl and use it to influence the masses in a dystopian world—when advertising is illegal.

Then I planned to share that according to the entertainment magazine, Deadline, Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) has agreed to write and direct the film. So far, though, to my knowledge, there is no release date.

So that was that. Not much of a blog. Until the more I read, I found the author equally if not more intriguing.

The Girl who was Plugged In was written by James Tiptree, Jr., who won the prestigious Hugo award for the story in 1974. I further learned that Tiptree is a pseudonym for author, artist and Air Force veteran Alice B. Sheldon. Tiptree (Sheldon) chose the pen name for various reasons but also to compete in the male-dominated science fiction field.

Tiptree/Sheldon’s list of literary awards is numerous. This multifaceted woman was also an artist, participating in group shows at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Alice B. Sheldon passed away in 1978. Tiptree’s Wikipedia page expands on his/her life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr.

Julie Phillips, a critic and award-winning biographer wrote Tiptree’s biography, and won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006. I recently found the book and purchased it on Amazon. After reading Tiptree’s Wikipedia page, as well as the following book description, I think it’s evident why Ms. Sheldon chose a pseudonym.  I look forward to reading James Tiptree, Jr., The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, and learning more about this remarkable woman.

 

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