Laura Benedict's Blog, page 32

So This Happened: An Edgar Nomination!

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News, y’all–I have big news!

It seems that my peers, fellow members of Mystery Writers of America, have selected my short story,A Paler Shade of Death, asone of five finalists for the 2017 Edgar Awards in the Short Story category.

What’s an Edgar Award? you might ask. (I didn’t know either until I became a mystery writer.). Well, you can read more about it here, but think of it as the Oscars for mystery and crime novels, stories, screenplays, and non-fiction work in the mystery genre.

I can...

A (Mostly) Irreverent Riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Have you read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? No, I mean have you read it recently? It’s one of those books that you might have read if you had a very cool 11th grade English teacher. (We read The World According to Garp by John Irving. That was definitely eye-opening.) I don’t think I actually read Frankenstein until college, and I read it because I loved horror novels. A lot of people say that they’re sure they’ve read it, but, honestly, even I started to conflate the book with the many Fran...

Next Day, Please.

According to my handy schedule, I planned to put up a postabout what books I’m reading right now.Frankenstein is in the hopper, as it were. But it can wait a day or two.

I had one of those days today. Yesterday went well, and I got lots of fiction writing done. No exercise to speak of–sadly it seems I can get one done, but usually both. I worked late and slept in. Well, I woke up when the school train left the station and dawdled on my iPad a bit, then went back to sleep. Then I had THAT MA...

After the Storm #1

We had two big storms last week, and I rushed outside after each with my camera and took a hundred photos. I’d love to put them all up at once, but I think I’ll spread them out over a fewweeks. The second was an ice storm–very dramatic. The first was all rain, with 30 mph winds that knocked over our basketball goal and uprooted a small tree. There were limbs down in town, as well. We saw county crews chainsawing several by the side of the road.

There are four furbabies in our house: Hrothgar,...

It’s a Lab Rat’s Life: Searching for Satisfaction on Social Media:

Do you ever feel like a treat-obsessed lab rat when it comes to social media?

Back in November and December, I made a concerted effort not to spend a lot of time playing on social media. Social media is indeed both work and play for me—I use it to stay in touch with friends and fans. I love goofy memes, and finding or posting interesting news stories, and learning silly and serious details about my friends’ lives. For those two months, I felt pretty smug about only spending a few minutes ea...

Sunday, 15 January 2017

Happy Sunday from good dog Scout, who hopes you can find half the happiness he feels when he has his favorite stick (hint: every stick is his favorite stick).

“A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.” — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

January 14th Words

Journal: 440 words

Long fiction: 0words

Short fiction: 0

Non-fiction: 605 words (admin paper)

Blogging: 63 words

Exercise: 15 minutes Kinect strength training

Saturday Serendipity

Happy Saturday!

This is my second Saturday putting up a post, so it means I’ve posted every day for over a week. I didn’t start out last week to blog every day, but I’m really enjoying giving it a shot.

I didn’t quite meet my goal of working on the novel each day, but I did journal every morning (well, in the afternoon that one day when I had beenup until almost three a.m., and had to take a morning nap…). It’s been a wonderful exercise to get back to my journal. In her book, The Artist...

Friday the 13th: My Beloved

I like to think of Friday the 13th as a little Halloween. And I love that it happens this time in the middle of winter. Winter is a great time for spooky stories.

Years ago, I wrote and recorded a spooky flash story about one of my biggest fears for Weekend America. Unfortunately they’ve since dropped the sound files from their website, but I still have the text:

My Beloved

I hold the reading lamp out in front of me as I approach my bed, its tiny glow illuminating the pool of dark at my f...

Fear is Sticky

Fear is sticky.

If you know me and my work at all, you know I think a lot about fear.

Fear is like wet glue. Honey. Spilled soda. Taffy that you’ve played with, leaving your hands a mess.

If you carry fear with you all the time, it gets on everything you come close to, so that everything looks sticky and unapproachable. Even the soft things, the desirable things. Fear creates a barrier between you and not only the things you truly do need to stay away from, and the things you yearn to be cl...

What I’m Reading This Week, 1/11/17

I just went through a period of having to read many books I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen for myself for a project. So these past weeks I’ve felt like a kid again, reading anything I want. How glorious! My taste in pleasure reading is very eclectic–everything from crime fiction to biographies to non-fiction. Throw in cereal boxes, celebrity online gossip, and free local newspapers, and you’ve got me covered.

Audiobooks are perhaps my favorite mode of reading. I love to be read to–whether i...