You couldn't pay me enough to go back to age 20. There's something to be said for gaining at least some wisdom as you go. And as I've gotten older, I've stopped caring so much what other people think. But that said, if I could sit down with my 20-year-old self right on the cusp of one of the...
How do you decide what to write? I get this question a lot. I think people who are deciding if they want to write a book spend a lot of time thinking about the external landscape—trends, state of the publishing industry, what agents want, what’s hot on one bestseller list or another. And look....
Writing “success” doesn’t happen overnight. We all tend to get caught up in such a narrow view of success, and specifically this idea of it happening "overnight." Writers definitely experience this. We see the people on the NY Times bestseller list, hear about the new writer who got a...
I’m one of those writers who has to continually psych myself out to get work done. It’s not that I don’t love writing—like, the actual act of writing. I do. I’ve always loved it. When I’m not doing it I have withdrawal. Hence the whole pursuing the writing career thing. But when I feel like the...
Once, in a job interview, I was asked how or when I knew that I could make a living as a writer. It wasn’t a question I’d thought about in advance. I could’ve answered in a multitude of ways, talked about my passion for books and making up stories and creating worlds that drew people in, made...
This is what I posted on my LinkedIn page to ring in the new year: Three things I'm NOT doing this year: Efforting (also known as making things harder than they need to be!) Overthinking Doubting myself I didn’t even think much about these things, honestly. I didn’t plan them. I didn’t spend the...
I hear this question all the time: “How do I write if have no time?” I get it. Time is THAT THING that we’re always pursuing more of, always in a race against, that’s always in our face, mocking us for all the things we didn’t get to yet. I’ve been working full time and writing two books a year...
This past weekend was the New England Crime Bake. It’s a writer’s conference that’s local to the Boston area. It’s also a special conference for me, because it was the one I found when I first Googled “mystery writer conferences” more than 20 years ago when I decided that I was going to write...
