Cathy Perkins's Blog, page 14

Do You Have What It Takes to be a Cheese Whiz? Archaic Words

By Kathleen Kaska 
When I worked at Cave Art Press, a small publishing company in Anacortes, one of my tasks was to write the weekly blog posts. It had to address writing styles, grammar and punctuation rules, and the down and dirty of publishing and marketing—and it had to be funny. These blog posts eventually became a tongue-in-cheek book entitled, "Do You Have a Catharsis Handy? Five Minute-Writer Tips." Here's one about archaic words and my own take on them.

Thanks t...

Clicking Our Heels: What We Read

Clicking Our Heels: Writers are often asked if they write in a particular genre, if that is the one they read. Here are some of what the Stiletto Gang members read and some of their favorite authors.

Robin Hillyer-Miles – I read many different genres. My favorite authors currently are Jess Loury, Susan Addison Allen, Susan Boyer, and Karen White.

Saralyn Richard – I read everything – mysteries, historical fiction, women’s fiction, biography, blended genres, literary fiction.

Kathleen Kaska – I r...

A Fun Interview with Bethany Maines

Interview by Kathryn Lane

(Bethany Maines is such a dynamic interviewee that I’ve kept the interview pretty much as it happened. To edit would lose the spontaneity of her responses.)

Bethany, I’m amazed by your dexterity as an author. You write in various genres, from crime fiction to mystery, to action adventure to sci-fi. Do you move from one to the other to keep your stories flowing?

Growing up I read mostly sci-fi/fantasy and mystery. I always assumed that if I wrote it would be sci-fi/fantasy ...

5 Things I Need to Write Every Day

 Debra Sennefelder

 

 

Since I became a full-time author in 2017, how I work has evolved. I went from squeezing a few hundred words in during a lunch break when I worked a 9-5 to scheduling writing sprints to accomplish a daily word count of 3,000 words. So, I thought today I’d share with you five of the things I to write a manuscript.

Here they are in no particular order and there’s a bonus one!

Clean desk – I don’t like clutter. It makes me uncomfortable when I have piles of papers, notebooks, ...

The Search for mi tatarabuela by Juliana Aragón Fatula

2015 Holy Cross Abbey, Canon City, Colorado



October 28, 2021  Dear Reader, 
October blew in like a hot air balloon on LSD. Whoosh. My lawn chairs down the block at the neighbor’s hootenanny. My golden Aspen leaves blown to smithereens and my wildflower seeds scattered to the wind. Southern Colorado today feels like windy Wyoming or the streets of Chicago on a blustery day in autumn. But let me get to the point. I’m not here to discuss the weather in Southern Colorado. I’m here to discuss the pheno...

How a "Perfect" Marriage Led to a Writing Career

By Lois Winston

Many authors mention in their bios that they always wanted to be a writer. Not me. I wanted to be an astronaut. Thanks to a right brain that quakes at the sight of anything requiring math skills, not to mention a body prone to motion sickness, that dream never came true.

My urge to write came as a result of a dream I had while on a business trip. Eventually, that dream became Love, Lies and a Double Shot of Deception, a story about secrets and revenge and the steps some people will...

Interview with Amateur Sleuth, Sarah Blair

By Lynn McPherson
Today on the Stiletto Gang, I'm interviewing Debra H. Goldstein's protagonist in the Sarah Blair Mystery Series... Sarah Blair!
Can you tell us a little about yourself and where you're from?
I was married at eighteen, divorced at twenty-eight, and all I got out of the marriage was my Siamese cat, RahRah. Starting over, having gone from a life of luxury to an efficiency apartment here in Wheaton, Alabama, the town I've lived in since I was born, is difficult. Luckily attorney Harla...

November 2021 Releases

 

November 2021 Releases

Presented by Dru Ann Love as previously reported on Dru's Musings

Here is a list of over 65 new titles representing major genres such as cozy mysteries, traditional mysteries, historical mysteries, and others releasing this month, with eight debut series.

The longest running series on this list is the “Murder She Wrote” franchise at 54 books.

As always, I hope there is a new title to suit everyone’s personal taste. Embrace the adventure!  

November 2, 2021
Mystery of the Eight ...

Fun chat with Author Lois Winston and T. K. Thorne

 

Today, for a treat, I'm chatting with cozy mystery author and fellow Stiletto Gang member, Lois Winston.  

 

TKT:  Lois, I just finished your novel Assault with a  Deadly Glue Gun, and I gotta know this. What came first, the characters or the glue gun idea?  And how does that relate to your process of building a novel?  Do you kill someone with a craft idea first and build the plot around that or do you focus on the characters first? Or some other way?

LW: In this instance, it...

Classics, by Barbara Kyle

 

 

Some things are simply never out of date, right? Thank goodness. Here are a few classics I hold dear.

 

Classic Clothes. I welcome autumn for the pleasure of pulling a smart, tried-and-true blazer out of the closet. And I'm always up for any chance to wear a little black dress; in this pic, it’s for my nephew’s lovely outdoor wedding.

 

Classic Books. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles are time-honored novels that I read as a teen and ...