Lynne's Blog

The Deadly Pitfalls of Dialect In my last blog about critique groups, I mentioned my mortification at being told my “novel” sounded like a “report.” Well, that wasn’t the only criticism I had to contend with. One of the major characters in Time Exposure is Alexander...

Recreating History -- Authentically My last book, Time Exposure, is a mystery that takes place during the Civil War. I wanted my readers to abandon the present and immerse themselves in those brutal, tumultuous years of the mid-nineteenth century. Scene by scene,...

Learning to be Humble I found my first critique group through a Writing Center and decided to try it out. The head of the group, Mike, was a published author and editor. No one else in the group was published. But they were my readers, so if they didn’t like my work,...

Part 1: Starting Out as a Writer I’ve been writing most of my life. As a child I kept a diary, in school, I wrote reports, dissertations, grant proposals, and other boring documents. Mostly I wrote for my jobs. First as a teacher, then as an educator at a museum, then...

What on Earth is Wrong With This Book? Did you ever find yourself reading a book, a good book, but find that something is bothering you about it? You can’t quite put your finger on it, so you sigh, throw it down for a while then pick it up later. The story is...

Use Your Five Senses to Jazz up Your Writing One of the simplest techniques to add life and breadth to your stories is by using your senses. All five of them: smell, taste, touch, auditory and visual. Okay, you may include a sixth--that extrasensory sense we all have...

Choosing a Name for Your Character One of the most important, but often most difficult part of writing a novel is selecting names for your characters. When you begin you might already have some in mind. But as the characters morph during the writing process, that name...

How I Choose Historical Themes to Create My Mysteries I have two passions behind my writing: history and forensics. How do I bring the two together, when forensics is relatively new and history, well, relatively old. When scouting out time periods that are of interest...

Writing Vs. Marketing: Which is More Important for Success? This may sound like a silly question but ever since I’ve self-published two books, I’m beginning to wonder. Many writers set aside a time of day, or a set number of hours, words, pages per day to write. If...

How Book Research Makes You (and Your Reader) Smarter When I started researching the Triangle Factory fire, I knew there were a lot of stories hidden in the rubble of the fire. In earlier blogs I discussed the social conditions of the garment workers, the tragedy of...