Terry Shames's Blog: 7 Criminal Minds, page 85

The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Nasty

Authors are told never to respond to bad reviews. Have you ever been tempted? How do you deal with negative comments? Pick a few irksome ones (anonymous of course) and let us know how you really feel … no judgment.

Brenda Chapman here.

I've come to be in a zen place with negative/nasty/dismissive/ reviews. I'm not sure who said it, but the best advice I ever heard when faced with a bad review is: "This person is not your reader". Yeah, they really aren't and that's okay. I'm not a fan of everythin...

Make Them All Unforgettable Characters, by Josh Stallings

Q: How much air time do you give to secondary characters? Have any threatened to take over a book?

A: I give them as much time as they need to be fully there. A paragraph, a chapter, I don’t have a formula. The tension between narrative drive and character exploration comes down to personal taste. I can feel when editing when I come to a section that’s off the main story if I want to blow past it, it means it needs work, either to cut it down or make it sing. 

I’m dancing around the question becau...

Whose book is it anyway? by Catriona

How much air time do you give to secondary characters? Have any threatened to take over a book? Choose one of yours that you particularly enjoy and share them with us, including a snippet of text that gives us their flavour.

This question made me laugh a hollow laugh. When I embarked on the Last Ditch Motel series, one of the boons - so I thought - was that there would be a different selection of transient minor characters in every book. You know, because it was set in a motel. 

That plan went eve...

Oh what a tangled web... by Cathy Ace

How much air time do you give to secondary characters? Have any threatened to take over a book? Choose one of yours that you particularly enjoy and share them with us, including a snippet of text that gives us their flavour.

Oh, this is a good one…and something I was asked about on a panel in which I participated at CrimeFest in Bristol, UK a couple of weeks ago. Yes, I’ve been “on the road again”, and it was a blast! Anyway, I won’t go on and on about how wonderful it was to spend time with my ...

A Man Walks into a Bar...

 Q: How much air time do you give to secondary characters? Have any threatened to take over a book? Choose one of yours that you particularly enjoy and share them with us, including a snippet of text that gives us their flavor.

 

-from Susan

 

Oh, boy, have they! A spunky teenage girl in the first French village mystery, LOVE & DEATH IN BURGUNDY, with whom I fell in love and ended up following around delightedly. She became, in a way, the warm heart of the story, the focus of way too much attention ...

The Road Not Taken

By Abir 

Who sparked your younger self to love writing?

 

I grew up in a house full of books, in a family full of story tellers. Our shelves were stacked high with books – in English, but just as much in Bengali. As a kid I’d stare at the curious Bengali type-face, with its pointed, angular letters dangling precariously from the top of a line rather than sitting, self-satisfied above it like the letters of the Latin script.

 

Bengali is a culture rich in stories – everything from folk-tales and fairy...

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants from James W. Ziskin

Who sparked your younger self to love writing?

(Disclaimer: Much of the following was published five years ago in Mystery Scene Magazine. I’ve added to it and updated it now.)

The answer to this week’s question is easy:

Reading (and by extension, my mother)

I began my journey to writing by reading my mother's childhood books. Picture books, poetry, adventure stories, and tales of far-off places. I remember the muddy brown-and-white lithograph bookplates, picturing a young girl in a wood and bearing ...

Stoking the burner

Who sparked your younger self to love writing?

by Dietrich

It wasn’t a who, but a what. The love of writing came from the love of listening to stories at an early age. There were the bedtime fairy tales my mother read to me when I was a kid, a lot of Grimm’s tales in German. Later on, my kindergarten teacher, Miss Mitchell, read to the class at story time — stories that sparked my imagination before I could read on my own. Funny, I still remember a lot of those tales in vivid detail. 

Once I could ...

Stoking the Fire

 

May 16 - Terry Shames here, telling who spurred my younger self to love writing; what I would tell them if I could meet them again; and who mentors me now. 
 I don’t think it was so much a “who” as a “what,” that sparked my interest in writing. The “what” was reading. When I was five, before I started school I begged my dad to teach me to read. I still remember him sitting down with me and working with me to make sense of those squiggly lines. Here’s the amazing part. At the time, he was going ...

It Takes a Village

Who sparked your younger self to love writing? What would you tell them if you could meet them again? Is there anyone you consider a mentor now? 

Brenda Chapman here.

I love this question! 

My younger self was inspired by every book read to me, and every book that I read once I acquired the skill. This really was where I learned my love of language and stories, where my imagination flourished.

But there were also teachers who nurtured my creative side, the most memorable being Mr. Nestor Trach, who ...