If you’re not brain-deep in publishing on a regular basis, you might not know just how little input an author has on the cover of her or his book. If you’re lucky, you get to see cover sketches. Perhaps you even get a chance to weigh in on various cover designs. For me, this was…
Category: About Writing
Topics useful to writers.
Cover Time!
I LOVE the cover of Death in the Haunted Wood and couldn’t wait to share it with you. Well, okay, I did have to wait, at least… until my publisher got to show it off first. The wait is over, and I hope you love this cover as much as I do. What do I…
A Matter of Taste
I’m thinking about book reviews right now as the first books in my cozy mystery series publish. Reviews are coming in for Murder in Last Chance Cove and most have enough stars to make me grin. I love finding consensus on what readers who’ve taken time to write reviews think I’ve done well. I learn…
Fixing & Fiction
Many of the things that happen to my amateur sleuth Saffi Graywood in Murder at Last Chance Cove were inspired by things that have happened in my life. If you have read the first book in my Pacific Northwest Cozy Mystery series, you may recognize the setting and which part of the plot it relates…
Raven About Series Authors
I devour series books from authors whose work I love as if they were truffles that might melt in a heatwave—like those many of us have been experiencing this summer. As I gobble up the goodness, I don’t really think about the hours and days and months and, sometimes, years that the author spent on…
Genre-Shifting Writers
When I first started writing, I wrote what I read: fantasy, for the most part, and romance. (I was 20-something, so the latter was probably a given.) I came very close to publishing a romance novel with Del Rey. An editor read the manuscript I sent and liked it. If I was willing to do…
Energy Break
When I’m really deep into a writing project, I can sit at a keyboard for hours and not notice the passage of time, until some body part—usually my neck or shoulders—calls a time out. If I wait until that happens to stop, and then I stand up…ouch! My muscles are stiff and my limbs resist…
Embracing the Crone
When my daughter was young, she once told me—in all innocence—that I have a witch’s nose. Shall we say I was not…grateful….for her statement of what she saw as an incontrovertible fact. After all, witch’s noses all look a certain way, right? Long and beakish, perhaps topped off with a wart sprouting several wiry hairs….
Take Flight
Outside my RV windshield, birds soar and swoop and dive. Not just once or twice a day but again and again and again. Pelicans glide into view in arrow-tight formations. Seagulls burst skyward, wings pumping against the wind. Crows chide and ravens rave as they skim the waves. What drives this constant motion? Dogs, sometimes….
Always Another Story
Recently, I’ve been writing short books for an educational publisher. There are no advances or royalties for this kind of writing. It’s flat-fee, work-for-hire writing and the writer gets a lot of input from the editors and series “authors” who, in this case, are big-name educators. This kind of writing can be an amazing teacher….
Cozies & Kim Griswell 