Terry Shames's Blog: 7 Criminal Minds, page 174

Walter Mosley's FUTURELAND

I'd imagine, if I wanted to step outside of my best life right now--thank you very much--to be anyone from any of the books that have stayed with me, I would be Walter Mosley's Ptolemy Bent, from his absolutely chilling, stirring, and memorable FUTURELAND. This may surprise some folks, given the comparisons and litmus tests I have to jump through for daring to be black and write mysteries without regard for all the other blacks who may have wanted to do so as well.

It ain't hate for...

Measure Twice, Cut Once

From Jim

Because I’ve been struggling to finish my latest project, I’ve decided to go off script this week and talk about outlining.

I’m trying finish off book 7 in my Ellie Stone series. TURN TO STONE is due out June 4, 2019, and it has turned into a nightmare of false starts, redos, and takeovers. And why is that? Because for the first time in my professional writing career, I began working on a novel without an outline or a clear plan.



Now we all know the writing world is divided into two cam...

Living between the pages

Of all the books you have read over the years, crime novel or otherwise, which book or books created a world and characters that you would like to live yourself? Which character would you want to be?
by Dietrich
I remember the books I loved as a kid, and the images created by Mark Twain, Jack London, Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling and other great writers remain in my head. I can still picture myself along the banks of the great grey green greasy Limpopo River, scenes I imagined of Victoria...

Plunging into a time and place that is not my own.

By R.J. Harlick

Of all the books you have read over the years, crime novel or otherwise, which book or books created a world and characters that you would like to live yourself? Which character would you want to be?
I’ve immersed myself in the stories of so many books over the years, that it is hard to decide which ones I would have liked to live myself. 
The one that immediately comes to mind from my youth is The Black Stallion by Walter Farley. Horse crazy at the time, I so want...

Entering a Fictional World - by Brenda Chapman

Of all the books you have read over the years, crime novel or otherwise, which book or books created a world and characters that you would like to live yourself? Which character would you want to be?
The first character who comes to mind is Sue Grafton’s ground-breaking Kinsey Millhone. Kinsey lives in a somewhat simpler time — the sixties to eighties approximately — in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California before climate change, cellphones and the Internet. She has an apartment above...

The Great American Book Ban

by Paul D. Marks PBS’s Great American Read recently announced Americans’ favorite book. It’s To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. We all know the basics of the story. Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman. Atticus’s children, Scout and Jem, are taunted by other children for their “N-loving” father. It’s more complex than that, but that’s at least part of the story in a nutshell.Around the same time that To Kill A Mockingbird was named America’s favorit...

Halloween Round Up

There's a yearly tradition round our way: on the afternoon of Halloween when the businesses of downtown Davis hand out sweeties to trick-or-treaters, my mother and I (and sometimes my father too) sit outside the coffee shop and silently judge admire the costumes.



Here's what I now know:

Elsa is over. Last year, Frozen was hot. This year we only saw one little pale-blue princess. (But there's still nothing more adorable than a tiny bedraggled princess with sugar all round her mouth.) Unicor...

Paperback Writer...by Cathy Ace

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Developing Ideas into Books

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A Library of Crime Fiction Classics

 - from Susan
We Minds get to go free-form this week. I would like to answer a question I got at a book event recently. The audience member asked, “Can you share three crime fiction books you think newcomers to the genre should read?” Because my brain tends to freeze when I’m put on the spot, and because I have more time to think when I’m writing it down, I’m expanding it to ten books, which is way easier than three and allows me to focus on different kinds of crime fiction. Of cours...