Neve Maslakovic's Blog, page 2

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December Newsletter

I Now Have a Substack

October Update

Hope everyone is having a good fall (or spring, depending on where on the globe you are!)

First, many thanks to those of you who kindly agreed to beta read If Your Problem is Murder and waded through the rough version of the manuscript. I received a lot of helpful feedback, digested it all, and gave the book one last good editing pass. It’s now ready for its next step – querying. That’s when it makes the rounds of literary agents — and I think I’ve thought of an even better title (to be r...

Call for Beta Readers

The title says it all. Book 1 of the new speculative mystery series is done and looking for a couple of beta readers!

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a beta reader is a generous soul who volunteers to read a pre-publication draft of a novel and provide feedback. (Alpha readers see the manuscript at an early, still-in-development stage; beta readers see a close-to-publication draft.)

If Your Problem is Murder is a speculative mystery set in 1985, the first in an intended series. (Y...

Welcome, 2023

Happy New Year! For me, January 1 always brings with it the feel of a crisp new notebook. Pages yet to be written. Moments to be grabbed, new things to be learned, adventures and struggles awaiting just around the corner.

Blue skies ahead, what’s over the horizon as yet unknown.

The ocean water picture is one I took from my cabin on the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat cruise, this past September in the Western Caribbean. It was an extraordinary experience. I’d never been on ...

June Update

In the Back Yard

Summer has finally arrived here in the Twin Cities after what seemed like a VERY long winter. The grass is green, dandelions are popping up all over, and the purple magnolia (Magnolia Ann) in our back yard survived its first Minnesota winter, no small feat. The picture above is from a month ago, mid-May, when the flower buds were just starting to emerge. (As to the yellow spots in the yard, well, if you have a dog you know what they are!)

Book Update

There’s now a ...

Recommended by Readers

A while back I asked you to chime in with reads you enjoyed in 2021. (Meant to post this back in January but here we are.) Below are some of the recommended books. We’ve got sci-fi/fantasy. We’ve got mystery. Sci-fi/mystery combos. A couple of time-travel romances. Thrillers.

My thanks to everyone who responded! Some of these authors I’ve read, others have gone on my TBR list.

I’ve just started one of the thrillers recommended, a book I hadn’t come across before, Mrs. Rochester’s Ghost, ...

New Year’s Newsletter

First, a welcome if you’ve recently found your way to this newsletter via my website, or a Voracious Readers Only giveaway, or the ArtWorks parking-lot fair back in September. Very happy to have you here!

This past year has gone by kind of fast, and yet when I think back to January it seems like a long time ago. A side effect of a pandemic year that was weird and strange for everyone? Our goldendoodle (Grif, age 3 1/2) agrees that time is a fluid concept — each spring he seems to complete...

July Newsletter

Hope everyone is having a safe and enjoyable summer!

Can anyone help me identify a bird? It nested a while back on the light fixture right outside our front door. There were at least three baby birds, from what we could see of the beaks peeking out of the nest. When we got back from a week away visiting family in South Carolina, everyone had flown the coop! I made an attempt to identify the breed by its brownish-white chest on one of those websites listing bird species in Minnesota,...