Guest Blogger ~ Julie E. Eble

~ patyjag ~ 1 Comment

When Words Don’t Come by Julie Eble

I sit at my desk, thinking, researching and tapping out intriguing stories when my brain freezes, and not from eating ice cream too fast. I’m mired, stymied, frustrated. I’m trapped in a lonely, silent space crowded with self-doubt and growing angst. Not even my thesaurus shakes me from this synaptic tundra. My brain repeats the same words, like Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s “The Shining”. Okay, that’s over the top, but you get the idea.

The dreaded block strikes most often when I’m stuck in a sentence that cries out for more imagery. A character whose fingers were cold. Just cold? No, no. This character is worthy of more. Somewhere in my loony cranium, I hear “SIMILE”, like, uh… “cold as ice”. Way too obvious. “Cold as a cucumber.” Used too much. “Cold as…,” “Cold as…” I stare at my screen. “Cold as a fish?” Again, too hackneyed. Ack! The block has me in its clutches!

A group of treasured friends from my grade school years once asked how I come up with funny, unexpected phrases. My confession surprised them. For me, they seldom just pop onto the page. I work at it. And when I’m truly stuck for a scintilla of an idea, I stop staring at the screen. I tap my pencil, swivel in my chair, study the scenery outside my window. Whatever it takes. Deadlines be damned.

One day as I stared at a recalcitrant phrase and my thoughts drifted into an epic, redundant stupor, I pushed back my comfy, wheeled, stuffed chair from my paper-strewn desk. I decided to walk around the house. If my brain cells were stuck, at least my body could get in some steps. I paced around the dining room table, circled the kitchen island, hiked up the steps, down the hallway and back, thinking: “Cold as a walrus’ tusk.” “Cold as a penguin’s flippers.” Did I tell you I booked a cruise to the Antarctic? “Cold as a granite coffin.” Oooh, that’s dark. “Cold as the frozen crab legs in my freezer.” Now that’s just silly. “Cold as a viper’s stare.” Oh, that fit.

I now use the walking-around technique whenever I’m truly struck. And that might be the end of this story, except for a little adventure I had with my 10-year-old granddaughter.

On a recent babysitting gig, my husband and I took her to the American Dream Mall. “Sprawling” doesn’t capture the mammoth structure. We wandered about and bumped into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. What a treat. We could select various questions for which each honoree had recorded answers. A video of each famous New Jerseyite popped, and we heard their answers. So cool. Bon Jovi, Connie Chung, Mark Kelly, and Jason Alexander, to name a few. But my “ah-ha” came from… are you ready… Judy Blume.

Yes, Judy Blume hails from New Jersey, and what she said fascinated me.

When she was a young girl, she spent hours bouncing a ball against a wall. So much so that her mother worried about her mental health. You know how moms can be. Judy said she was working through issues, ideas, plots, whatever. And she told us, science has confirmed a link between movement and creativity.

In 1997, the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that physical exercise can improve creativity. In 2021, Austria’s University of Graz found a relationship between physical exercise and imagination. I expect further research is being done by human scientists that artificial intelligence will tell us all about it.  

I continue to wear out my carpets to capture just the right bit to slip into a sleek, cheeky, glum or silly sentence. And it’s not bad for my waistline either.

Her ex-husband. His billionaire fiancée. One final negotiation. What could go wrong?

With spunk in her step and humor as her shield, Emma faces her ex at the fabled Vanzetti estate to cut the final cords of their ill-fated marriage. When the demanding heiress threatens her, she erupts.

Hours later, the bride-to-be gasps her last breath.

The police zero in on Emma at her cozy nest at the corner of Apple Road and Apricot Lane. A hunky but stoic detective and his team unearth evidence that incriminates her. Evidence that can’t exist. Can it?

Emma, still mourning her father’s death and armed only with her innocence, fights back. When she flounders, her cynical roommate, the elusive private investigator Stevie Rivers, teaches naïve Emma key lessons of detecting. Together, the stalwart and the cynic dive into Brandywine Valley’s world of wealth and equestrian eventing.

Their wry banter deepens their friendship, but the cloud around Emma continues to thicken. They must unearth the real killer before cold steel doors close behind Emma.

But as the horses clear the cross-country hurdles, the murderer strikes again. Emma and Stevie must risk their lives in a deadly race to stop the killer before they become the next victims.

“With punchy humor on every page, Dad Didn’t Prep Me for Murder takes the reader into the world of equestrian eventing with skill, wit, and a perceptive understanding of both people and horses. Julie Eble provides a compelling mystery with well-developed characters and an action-packed ending, and I enjoyed every minute of it.”

Lucinda Gerlitz, Author of Etiquette Can Be Murder newsletters

Buy links: Amazon

Barnes & Noble

BAM!

Bookshop.org 

Julie Eble is an author and award-winning playwright and entrepreneur. As an amateur birder, she often travels with her husband seeking out new species for their life list. She is member of Sisters in Crime, an avid reader, and huge fan of Philadelphia sports teams. 

Her debut amateur sleuth mystery, “Dad Didn’t Prep Me for Murder” published on 15 April 2025. You can find Julie on her website www.julieeble.com

Flaws and All

~ lanamfox ~ 2 Comments

Have you heard the old saying, “I love him/her, flaws and all”? We all have flawed people in our lives that we love, right? Because we all have flaws. In order to write good stories, we need to make sure that our characters have flaws too.

Do my characters have flaws?

I had to stop and really think about that. When I made my character sketches, I don’t remember thinking about what their flaws were. Now I have to go back and do that because none of us want to read about perfect people.

In my Hood River Valley Mystery/Thriller series, Detective Liz Ellisen is the main character.  She is strong, courageous, smart, kind, friendly, did I mention smart? When I try and come up with flaws for her, the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that she jumps into dangerous situations without thinking about the consequences. That makes her a good cop, but is it enough of a flaw to keep the reader reading? She’s also stubborn and won’t give up on an investigation until she solves the crime.

Spoiler alert here. If you don’t want to know, don’t read this paragraph! Liz has been through a lot. In the first book in the series, My Sister’s Keeper, her father and sister were both murdered, and she found out her husband was cheating on her with her best friend. Liz is strong. She mourned her family members, grieved for her marriage and friendship and moved on. There is a character in the series that Liz really, really doesn’t like. She often judges this character’s actions before she knows what’s going on. Liz is a great friend and she defends her friendships. She doesn’t, however, defend fools and there are a couple people in her life that fall into that category.

I recently read Mad Mabel. What a great bunch of characters. They were all flawed, even the 7-year-old girl. If you haven’t read it, it’s a great induction into flawed characters. But we can’t all write Mad Mabel. Someone has already written it, but we can learn from it and other stories with great characters.

I love writing about flawed characters. In my first book, The Truth Will Set You Free, a young woman is looking for her birth family. She traces her birth mother to a small town and a community that will do anything to protect their secrets and lies. This story has a dual timeline. It’s told through the daughter’s point of view, present day, and the mother’s point of view, thirty years earlier.

As much as I loved the main character, I loved writing about her mother even more. She was flawed, but she was a product of her upbringing and the way the town had treated her when she was a teenager.

In My Sister’s Keeper, I loved writing about cult leader, Jeremiah Swanson because he was bigger than life and extremely flawed.

And so it goes. Flawed characters are fun to write about and fun to read.

Did you watch the movie, The Blind Side? I loved Sandra Bullock’s character. She took in a young African American boy who didn’t have a home and gave him one. She did everything she could for that boy. And he came to love her, even calling her Mama. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend watching it if for nothing else, watch it for the character development.

One of my favorite books on building characters is Fiction is Folks by Robert Newton Peck. This book has been around for a while, but it’s great for understanding how to write compelling characters.

We’ve all read books where the characters are so well drawn that we feel we know them. We’ve also all read books, at least I have, where I get to the end of the story and realize it has a great story line, but the characters are interchangeable. This is especially true for crime fiction. Sometimes the author concentrates so hard on the plot that they forget to build strong characters. And you’re left feeling flat because the story didn’t touch your emotions.

The only way to write great stories is to write great characters. It doesn’t matter what genre you write, breath life into your characters. Your readers will thank you for it. They will read your book and come back for more.

Polishing prose so it sparkles

~ donaleeMoulton ~ 6 Comments
by donalee Moulton

We’ve been talking about the editing process. We started at 30,000 feet looking at the big picture. Now we’re on terra firma.

In my book The Thong Principle: Saying What You Mean and Meaning What You Say, I discuss the various types of editing – and why they are all essential. For many of us, however, editing is synonymous with copyediting.

The Thong Principle: Saying What You Mean and Meaning What You Say

When you’ve finished the first draft of a book, a weight is lifted. Some writers do a dance of joy. But even as we celebrate an important milestone, we remind ourselves that there is more work to be done. The book needs to be read – line by line – for consistency, conciseness, and clarity. That is the heart of copyediting.

Copyediting is like minor surgery. The impact can be significant, but structural changes and in-depth revisions are not necessary (or have already been done).  This type of editing, the most common for most of what we write, involves editing a document for style, flow, and clarity. It also requires ensuring a consistent tone and pacing. Publishers often call it line editing.

Editors Canada offers the following overview for stylistic editing, or line editing. For many writers, this is what they’re doing when they are copyediting. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what we call it as long as we do it.

Stylistic Editing

Editing to clarify meaning, ensure coherence and flow, and refine the language. It includes:

  • eliminating jargon, clichés, and euphemisms
  • establishing or maintaining the language level appropriate for the intended audience, medium, and purpose
  • adjusting the length and structure of sentences and paragraphs
  • establishing or maintaining tone, mood, style, and authorial voice or level of formality

What’s a Copyeditor To Do

Here are six areas of focus to help ensure your writing resonates with your audience and achieves your purpose.  When you look closely at these elements, you sharpen the writing and the plot. Readers are more likely to be carried along by your words. There will be no head scratching and no rereading to make the meaning is clear.

Check for:

ONE: CLARITY
Look to see if you are using:

    • Long sentences that could confuse readers
    • Big words readers could stumble over
    • Uncommon words that will furrow their brows
    • A tone that distracts or conflicts with the content

    Bottom line: Make sure the meaning of what you write can’t be misinterpreted.

    TWO: TRANSITIONS

    • Between sentences
    • Between paragraphs
    • Movement in time, place, subject

    Transitions aren’t usually complex. They flow naturally moving readers through prose with short, everyday words like “however,” “so,” and “then.”

    THREE: CONCRETENESS

    • Facts and figures
    • Specific language
    • Action verbs
    • Active voice

    Readers want us to paint a picture for them – one they can see and one they can believe in.

    FOUR: REPETITIVENESS

    • Are specific ideas repeated unnecessarily?
    • Are words used more than once in sentences? In paragraphs?

    Tip: Avoid summarizing. Readers don’t require it, and it slows them down.

    FIVE: COMPLETENESS

    • Are the 5Ws and how answered?
    • Are there any unanswered questions when there shouldn’t be?

    Have you emphasized the most important question: Why?

    SIX: FLOW

    • Does the content make sense
    • Do the words move smoothly

    Find out for yourself.  Read your writing out loud.

    Hacked!

    ~ Margaret Lucke ~ 4 Comments
    Banner showing author Margaret Lucke and some of her books

    By Margaret Lucke

    Connections with friends and family, facts at your fingertips, movies, puzzles, games (I’m looking at you, New York Times Spelling Bee). The internet, email, and other forms of modern technology have many benefits to offer. Maybe even AI does, though the jury is still out on that one, if you ask me.

    But there are downsides too, and I experienced one of those the other day when my professional author email address got hacked.

    The first hint of the disaster came a week ago Friday in the form of a phone call from a friend—I’ll call her Grace—who is on the mailing list for my newsletter. She said, “I got an email from you about needing money from a workshop. I responded to it saying I’d be happy to contribute, but the next message asked me to send the money directly to ‘him’ via Venmo. The him made me suspicious, so I thought I’d check. Was this request really from you?”

     Well, it most certainly was not from me. I asked Grace to forward the email exchange to me, which she did.

    Turned out the request for money was tacked onto a brief exchange of emails we had when she sent a compliment in response to my August 2024 email, using the pro address. The new (fake) message, sent on June 6, 2026, said: “Could you please email me back when you receive this.” So she did, replying with a one-line message along the lines of “Sure, what’s up?”

    That triggered a long, plaintive, tear-jerk of a message that said, in part: “I’m in a really tight spot with the Writers Workshop & Fundraiser I’ve been pouring my heart into” and “I wouldn’t reach out like this if it weren’t truly urgent. The full payment has to be made before Monday, or I risk losing the space and with it, months of preparation, energy, and resources I’ve already invested” and “If you’re able to support me in any way, it would mean more than I can express. This project is deeply personal to me, and I’m doing everything I can to keep it from slipping away at the last moment.”

    None of which is true.

    After my conversation with Grace, I started hearing from others who had received similar emails that purported to be from me. One friend reported that after she responded to the “Could you please email me back when you receive this” message, she received a request in my name that she support a political candidate whom she knows I oppose.

    It was time to take action.

    I tried to log into my pro email account, which is attached to my website. My password wouldn’t work. When I tried to change it, I was asked to enter an authentication code that I never received. So I initiated an online chat with the provider of my website and pro email address. I went around and around with an AI bot, which kept suggesting I try generic solutions, none of which helped. Finally I convinced the bot that I needed to deal with a real human being. With that person’s help I was able to set a new password and new two-factor authentication.

    Hopefully the problem is now resolved. What I’ve lost is a lot of time, all of the emails that were in my now-empty inbox and sent file, and perhaps some goodwill.

    I sent out an emergency email to my newsletter list, just in case, warning my subscribers about the hack. But for the newsletter I use a mailing service. Those individuals’ addresses weren’t in my pro email records except for the few who had gotten in touch with me that way.  

    One little suspicious thing: I had spent the previous Sunday at the Bay Area Book Festival, signing and schmoozing at the Bay Area Romance Writers booth. I pleased to collect three new subscribers for my newsletter and I had pleasant chats with everyone who signed up. Later, when I sent them my standard welcome email, I included a new tagline that I hadn’t used before. Interestingly, that tagline was used on the spam emails sent in my name. I’m not quite sure what to make of that.

    The whole experience has left me shaken. And frustrated. And angry. And confused.

    So if anyone reading this post receives an email from me that makes a plea for money or asks you to support a politician—or even one that just says: “Could you please email me back when you receive this”—please let me know it happened so I can figure out the next steps I need to take. Your next step is to not respond and put it in your trash or your junk/spam folder. And please be cautious. The scamsters are out there and they want your funds badly enough to steal them.  

    Travel for Fun and Location

    ~ janispattersonmysteries ~ 3 Comments

    by Janis Patterson

    Ah, the beginning of summer! The white hot skies, the unexpected rains, the siren call of pools and lakes… for some. For me summer means travel. (If I were to be honest I’d have to say that’s true of all seasons, but this is summer, so let’s leave it at that.) Travel is one of my greatest pleasures, and it influences me greatly.


    And, being a writer, that means my writing is influenced as well. Back in my days of trad-publishing-only whenever I wanted to take a trip (I was much younger, single and fancy-free) and could afford it, off I went. Of course I kept every receipt and expense so the trip could be claimed as a business tax deduction. (One of the nicest things about being a writer is that with just a little creativity just about everything except your morning cereal can be claimed as a business tax deduction.) Then when I returned home just to legitimize my expenses I would write about 50 pages and a synopsis (which in those antique days we called a proposal) and send it to my editor. Silly practice, which accounted for me having to write a couple of books I really didn’t want to!


    A location can be as compelling a character in your book as any human… sometimes more so, so you have to be accurate in describing it. And if you aren’t, believe me, there are lots of people out there who will take great delight in correcting you.


    One of the mantras writers learn early is Research Research Research. This is doubly true when describing a setting. You have to be accurate, but also relatable, and you don’t dare let your descriptions grow so detailed that they clog the action. People don’t like great indigestible lumps of info dump. When I travel I take copious notes and photographs as well as picking up brochures and other information. When I can’t resist it I also buy books, which accounts for a large portion of my overweight baggage fees.


    On the other hand, you have to be delicate about how much information you put in your story. While I recommend knowing as much as you can, that does not mean you have to put in everything you know. For example, suppose you are writing about a famed craft/art show. You don’t need to put down the square footage, or the miles of paths, or the opening hours… UNLESS any or all of these are clues or some other kind of vital information. Even if they are, be a little bit subtle about it. There’s nothing more annoying than a fact surrounded in neon that blinks “Here’s a clue – here’s a clue.” Let the reader take the sleuthing journey with you. Make them work just a little – don’t spoon feed them the clues in an obvious way.


    But facts aren’t the only metrics or even usefulness of locations. There’s so much more than can evoke reactions in your readers. Sight is often the primary reference point, but smell and sound can convey so many levels of feeling. Use them to create exactly the reaction you want. What does the character hear? Traffic? Cowbells and mountain breezes? Rock music? What does the air feel like? Dry? Humid? Soft? What smells are there? Green growing things? Car exhaust? The smell of broiling meat from the food court? The only thing is, whatever you’re putting in your story has to be (reasonably) available in the actual location.


    But this is so simple, I can hear you saying. How can you write about a place and not mention all that? Hate to tell you, but far too many writers do exactly that. Don’t be one of them. Take your reader with you and show the location as it is. Show it as you saw it. It’s almost as good as going again.