A few weeks ago the novelist Laurel Dewey graciously shared with us her story about writing her debut suspense novel Protector. It's a book driven by a complex protagonist named Detective Jane Perry. We were curious to know how Laurel created her hero so we called her up for an insightful and fascinating conversation about character development:  Continue reading...

How much research did you have to do before writing your book? That's one of the questions you'll hear most often if you've just published an international thriller. Implicit is the assumption all that research had to be done before the story was written, yet in reality the writing process was never that linear, especially for a first-time author.  Continue reading...

When I wrote Confessions of Super Mom, I wrote it as a stand alone book. Meaning I had no thought of continuing the story further. I was not a reader of series books; women's fiction, at least at that time, didn't really put out many series. They were mainly single titles, and that was what I read, and it was what I thought I'd written.  Continue reading...

Over a woe-is-me, three-martini lunch twenty years ago, a pal and fellow disgruntled stockbroker told me a tale that became the basis for my debut novel, Big Numbers. A half-eaten olive spat from my mouth even before I heard the punchline. "Say that again?"  Continue reading...

I daydream a lot. If my mother had been the sort of mother who kept boxes of elementary school mementos, I could prove it with the comments sections of my report cards. "Kristi (I changed the "i" to a "y" sometime during adolescence, forever confounding my grandparents) is very bright, but tends to daydream too much," or "Kristi could be an "A" student if she stopped daydreaming." So my mother wasn't the sort of mother who kept every scrap of my childhood perfectly preserved, but luckily for me she was the sort of mother who didn't get all worked up about curtailing daydreams.  Continue reading...

At the outset, a famous novelist warned me that if I insisted on writing Finn I ought to be constantly on my guard. "Mr. Clemens," he said, "will be looking over your shoulder." He didn't know the half of it. And frankly, neither did I.

Only when I showed early bits of the manuscript to other writers did I begin to understand. There was plenty of encouragement, of course, and lots of praise, but beneath it all was an undercurrent of, How dare you?

 Continue reading...