Kassandra Lamb's Blog, page 41

4 More Things To Do (or Learn) by the Time You’re 64

by Kassandra Lamb

Sunday I turned 64 — the age that the Beatles made famous… “Will you still need me, will you still…”

Two years ago, I posted about 15 Things We Should Do (Or Learn) by the Time We’re 62. I re-ran that post recently. Now I am adding four more things to that list.

1. Learn to make life easier by letting others help.

I’m a cussedly independent person, but at the same time, nothing makes me feel better than helping out a friend. That dichotomy in my personality always reminds me...

COPS AND WRITERS

by Kassandra Lamb

Two weeks ago, I attended the most amazing conference of my life, The Writer’s Police Academy. And that’s saying something since I’ve been to a lot of conferences through the years.

Mock “unknown assailant on campus” scenario

Real cops, firefighters, EMS personnel, lawyers and private investigators taught us how to Write it Right in our mysteries and thrillers. Sister mp author, Vinnie Hansen, also attended and she told us about her favorite takeaways last week.

Today, I’d l...

10 Nuggets from the Writers’ Police Academy

Vinnie Hansen and I attended a rather unusual conference last week. It’s called the Writers’ Police Academy. Law enforcement and EMS faculty (among others) taught us how to get it right when we have cops, courtrooms and/or blood in our novels.

Which happens a lot when one writes murder mysteries.

I’ll be sharing some of my best moments from the conference next week but today Vinnie’s here to tell us about her experience.

The Friday morning “announcement” at WPA was a staged car crash. They br...

15 Things We Should Do (or Learn) by the Time We’re 62 (encore)

by Kassandra Lamb

I’ve been at a writer’s conference all weekend, so no time to write a blog post. It was an incredible and very different kind of conference, and I’ll tell you all about it next week, but right now I’m resting up.

So I thought I’d offer up this older post that was quite popular. I wrote it around my birthday two years ago and I’m planning to do an updated version in a few weeks.

15 Things We Should Do (or Learn) by the Time We’re 62

This was inspired by a Huffington Post blog...

What We’ve Been Reading Lately ~ #BookReviews

Time for another round of book reviews from some of our misterio press authors. Most writers don’t get to read nearly as much as they’d like to, because so much time is taken up with their writing. So when we discover a really good book, it’s an extra special treat!

Kirsten Weiss ~ The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling)

Supermodel Lulu Landry takes a swan dive off her balcony. Is it suicide or murder? Down-on-his-luck PI Cormoran Strike has been hired to find out.

The Cucko...

7 Things White People Can Do – Follow-Up

by Kassandra Lamb

I almost rested on my laurels after last week’s post. After all, I had done my part. I’d helped spread the word about how black people are harassed so often by bad cops that it’s “just part of life” for them. And I came up with some constructive things that people could do in their communities.

Shaquille O’Neal (public domain)

Plus, I know that my city has some great cops!

Remember the story about the police officer going on a call about kids playing basketball “noisily,” a...

The Power of Group Support

by Kassandra Lamb

I’m in the middle of a two-week stint of fast-drafting. What is fast-drafting, you might ask?

A bunch of authors get together and make a commitment to themselves and each other that they will write X number of words per day for a certain period of time. Each author sets their own goals but they’re not supposed to let anything interfere with making it happen.

I’m going for 3,000 words a day, an ambitious but not unreasonable goal. I’m normally lucky if I write 3-4,000 new wor...

Chasing Your Dreams!

by Kassandra Lamb

We all have dreams, and we all believe that we want our dreams to come true.

So what stops us? Many people will say that life gets in the way. I can certainly relate to that. While I was busy making other dreams come true–marriage, raising a child, becoming a psychotherapist–my dream of being a writer simmered on the back burner for a very long time.

But other things can get in the way as well. The biggie is fear of failure.

(public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

The bigger the...

Teasing vs. Bullying

by Kassandra Lamb

In response to my Ask a Shrink request for psychology topics last week, one of my fellow authors, Lynn Kelley (she writes children’s books) asked this question: What’s the difference between mean kidding and bullying, and what does it say about the person doing it?

This is a question I can address not only as a psychologist but as someone who has lived it.

“Mean kidding” is an oxymoron. If it’s truly kidding, then it isn’t intended to be mean, although it might accidentally...

WORD!!

image by Vicious Speed, public domain, Wikimedia Commons

by Kassandra Lamb

There’s this thing going around where, in lieu of new year’s resolutions, people pick one word to represent their hopes and goals for 2016.

One word? Seriously? I never say anything in just one word.

But hey, I’m game to try. The first word that came to mind was “Wow!” But that was probably a better word for 2015 than 2016. This past year, my books did particularly well. And I started getting emails, several a week, f...