Elizabeth Spann Craig's Blog, page 241

Preparing for a Conference

Friday morning at o' dark-thirty, I'm going to the Malice Domestic conference in Washington, DC.

Cool things about this: I get to meet (in person) some of the great folks I've gotten to know online over the last year or so. And I'm looking forward to the panel I'll be on Saturday afternoon--"Senior Sleuths versus Middle-Aged Meddlers and Crime-Cracking Kids: How Age Impacts the Story."

Uncool things? Well, I'm packing and flying. I should write a book entitled The Paranoid...

Twitterific

As promised, I'm running a post with the past week's interesting writing/reading related links that I found in my Google Reader and tweeted on Twitter.

Well,it's almost a week's worth. :) The page acted like it wanted to crash, so I'm backing off putting any more data up on it for right now.

Again, this isn't meant to overwhelm anybody—I'm hoping that by posting these links in a searchable database (my blog), that maybe we can access these helpful links by topic—when we need them.

If ...

Setting Up a Blog--and a Thanks

First of all, I want to thank Writer's Digest for the honor of choosing Mystery Writing is Murder as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers (Genres/Niches). Their list has just been published in the May/June 2010 issue, just hitting the stands now. Thanks so much!

But it's all due to my friends who are so active on my blog—supporting me with their comments and making me think. Y'all are incredibly supportive and I really, really appreciate it.

I spoke Thursday evening at the Women's N...

Setting the Mood

Usually my son gives me a play-by-play of what he's working on at school.

But the past couple of week, his Language Arts class has been concentrating entirely on writing to prep for a standardized exam. And somehow he neglected to tell me until a couple of days ago. :)

I guess he thinks I'll be entirely too interested. He's right. Writing, I think, is hard to teach, and I'm curious how people approach it.

In preparation for this exam, the school had each of the six 7th grade English...

Tugging

What happens if you have two things—or two facets of a character's personality—that are equally important to the protagonist but conflict with each other?

We could use the tug between a character's work and his family—and a character who loves both things equally. Suddenly we increase his work demands and his family needs simultaneously. How will he respond? What kinds of choices will he make and how will it change the plot? Maybe he misses his shot at promotion when he spends more...

On Tiptoeing

Living in Charlotte, North Carolina, I'm—surprisingly—one of the few Southerners I know here. I'm surrounded by neighbors who've moved from the North for (mainly) banking jobs.

In the small Southern town I grew up in, we would have called these folks Yankees. Not in a derogatory way, but more as an explanation. ("She couldn't understand a word I said. She's a Yankee." Or maybe: "A big water bug landed right next to her on the table and she screamed bloody murder! She's not used to bugs...

Problem Solving

Since our novels are all supposed to have tons of conflict in them (major, minor, and in between), our protagonists need to use their problem solving skills…usually.

In real life, I think our personalities have a lot to do with the way we approach our problems.

Some people panic, some people shut down, some avoid problems as much as possible, some people deny there is a problem, some attack problems head-on.

Some people have a methodical approach to solving problems, some have a...

Twitterific

Once again, I'm posting writing links that I previously posted to Twitter.

The idea of doing this isn't to overwhelm anyone---I'm overwhelmed looking at this list myself! But I thought that if I kept track of these writing links in a searchable database (you can search my blog on the top left of the page) then maybe we can access some of these helpful links by topic, when we need to?

Helpful writing sites: http://dld.bz/a5t2 @gracefuldoe about 1 hour ago

10 of the best breakfasts...

Dropping Clues About Our Characters

So I was in the grocery store….again….(must make more lists) and was nearly run down by a little guy pushing a shopping buggy that was bigger than he was.

"Benjamin! Watch our for the mommy!" fussed his mother before apologizing to me.

She kept on scolding, "Honey, you can't just go running through the store with the cart! You could have hurt this mommy."

I was—quickly—walking away by this point, but I was struck by the fact that the woman had pegged me, twice, as a mother.

As far as...

Getting Past "Stuck"

Today I'd like to welcome Alan Orloff to the blog. Alan is a fellow Midnight Ink author with a new release--Diamonds for the Dead. He's also writing a new series for Midnight Ink--The Last Laff series. Thanks so much for coming by today, Alan!

Thanks Elizabeth, for inviting me to guest post today. I love your blog and I totally agree, Mystery Writing Is Murder.

Sometimes, the words don't seem to flow. And sometimes, even when the words are appearing on your computer screen, they seem dull a...