Agatha Christie’s Best Opening Lines

Nothing beats the excitement of beginning a book. Whether you are starting a new story, opening a recommended read, or revisiting a favorite novel, the sheer pleasure of those first lines is hard to quantify. While researching for a cozy, I came across this excerpt from a website dedicated to Ms. Christie’s works. I wanted …

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Recipe For Delicious Writing

What do I need to reach the delicious writing goal? You need a host of fresh characters, imaginative plotting, soupçon of back-story, descriptive settings, minimal but creative description, tension leading up to conflict, theme, subtext, allusion, pacing, climax, resolution, logic, whimsy, surprise, and prose.

Opal Writers Magazine

Do You Want to Write a Cozy Mystery?

I just finished writing cozy mystery #18, so let me try and answer this. But first the question, what is a cozy? A cozy is a mystery with certain ingredients. First of course, there’s the protagonist who must be an amateur. This amateur often has friends who are law enforcement of some kind, but they …

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The Shower Muse

Think about the last time and place you got a great idea or solved a problem that’d been plaguing you. Where were you? The answer is a cliché: You were probably in the shower – Christine Carter

A Writer’s Legacy

Becoming a grandmother coincided with the big five-o. I pondered what legacy I could leave my very first grandchild. I decided upon a journal. I am after all a writer. I was anxious to chronicle how special this life was to our family.