Author Interview

Meet Lisa Samson

It’s been a long hot summer, and I’ve been waiting impatiently for the temperatures to finally drop. Leaving the air conditioned house and returning to my back porch is delightful. Ah, this breath of fresh air gives me a new perspective on life. It’s a beautiful day and I’m happy to be a part of this great big world!

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Spine Chiller Thrillers

What’s with the White Knuckles?

We bumped along in the military jeep, heading through a lonely stretch of sandy geography that marks the end of Israel’s official land control in the south. As we passed burned-out cars, rusty junk, and outbuildings that had been blown up months before, we saw the place looming ahead. That chaotic, violence-racked...

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Genre Happenings

Sharon Dunn’s Five Quick Tips for Writing Better Mysteries

1. Start your story as close to the crime as possible.
There is nothing like a body dropping to get a reader’s attention. This is what I call the shoot-first-and-answer-questions-later policy. Background and establishing character relationships can happen in later chapters. Most good novels pose a question in the early chapters that carries through the whole book. For mysteries, the question is

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Multicultural Fiction

Researching Multicultural Fiction

Writing multicultural fiction sometimes requires research to explore unfamiliar cultures, including religious practices and daily living. The word research may conjure up visions of college assignments and finding dry information for an even drier paper to turn in to a professor. But not so in the writing world! Here’s a sampling of interesting facts about Navajos I uncovered while researching one of my books, Cottonwood Place.

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Reviewers Corner

This month's featured reviewer:
Peg Phifer

Until her relocation to Nevada in 1980, Peg Phifer has lived most of her life in Wisconsin. An avid reader since Dick and Jane, she is seldom seen without a book in hand. A sufferer of childhood asthma, Peg spent a lot of time bed-ridden (those days they didn't know how to treat asthma) and created stories of her own based on other books she loved to read. But her desire to pursue writing seriously didn't surface until past

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Devotional

A Leaf in the Forest

If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?

We didn’t know where we were—but we weren’t lost.

My husband and I love New England in the fall. We’re “leaf peepers” (yep, that’s an actual term).

Our agenda? To have none. No schedule, no reservations, and no goal other than seeing what each day has in store.

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