Sheila's Guests and Reviews

Jean Henry Mead’s latest novel is Murder on the Interstate , third in the Logan & Cafferty mystery/suspense series. Her two protagonists, Dana Logan and Sarah Cafferty, are amateur sleuths traveling the country in a motorhome. Along a mountainous highway in northern Arizona they discover the body of a young woman in her Mercedes convertible and take off after the killer. Along the way they discover that he’s pursuing them and is a member of a homegrown terrorist group that later kidnaps them while plotting the downfall of the nation. Click here for my review of Murder on the Interstate. Jean is the author of 14 books, both fiction and nonfiction as well as children’s mysteries. She’s also an award-winning photojournalist and former news reporter/editor. And I'm delighted to welcome her today to my blog where she's answering the question, How difficult is it to write and publish a novel. Over to you Jean, and thank you so much for sharing this post. Writing and Pub...

I love to read, and I read almost any genre I come across. I love the sense of different worlds and ideas in historical novels. I love the feeling of "I've been there" in books set in England or the Pacific Northwest. And I love the wild imagination of science fiction. I'd love to write in all these genres too, but I don't suppose I shall. I haven't the patience or attention to detail that history would require. I don't have the confidence to trust my memories of places that really exist. Which leaves sci-fi I guess. My family used to watch movies together on TV when I was growing up. Later I watched with husband and sons. But they're all such perfectionists. Every detail that's wrong must be noted, preferably in triplicate... Which leaves sci-fi... So now I've had a novel accepted and it's definitely NOT sci-fi. I'm editing it, and I'm still not sure I want to tie it down to a time and place. It's just a story. It's a...

Our book group read " Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet " last week. We all seemed to like it, but some members found the dialog distracted from the story and didn't ring true to their memories of time and place. Our writing group listened to an excellent talk from Myrna Oakley yesterday. She told us how our story-telling plans should start with a location plus characters. And my critique group read and critiqued my newly added sections from my novel, Divide by Zero, also yesterday. I was trying to create a better sense of the main character but the first question everyone asked was "Where and when is this set?" Wherein lies my problem: Can anyone tell me if it's possible to write a successfully rootless novel? I know the local time and place of my story; I think I give a good enough feel for the world the characters inhabit. But I've not paid any attention to the larger world: Is this small town in England or America (or even Australia)? Ar...

I got some really good feedback about my middle-grade novel series yesterday. The first three chapters of book three were up for critique at our local writing group. I'd been wondering if it was even worth persevering with, but they seemed to find enough that they liked to persuade me I ought to try. So now I have three main things to think about: 1. I need a stronger start. One suggestion was to start with chapter two, but they liked the character introductions in chapter one, so maybe I should look for some other strong event... or at least a strong sentence. 2. I need to be more careful about introducing "new" characters; readers might not have read the previous books. 3. I need to think about how my chapters end... So, here's where I ask you a question. My instinct is to treat chapters like short stories each with a beginning, middle and end. I suspect that's born of the fact that I read in short bursts; I like to know where I last left off, and I like know wh...

Perhaps I could use my time more efficiently by writing, but I've got a headache so instead I'll just think about writing for a while. I've read quite a few blog posts recently by authors telling how they create novels. It's comforting that there isn't just a single "right way" and the advice to "write the way that works for you" makes lots of sense. But what about writing the way that works for the novel? I'm only asking because as I head into editing all my current manuscripts again - my usual winter task - using Snowflake to organize myself, I'm wondering how I'd have used the software at the writing stage, and realizing that I approached the writing of each novel completely differently. Perhaps that just means I haven't worked out what works for me yet, but I felt like it was working at the time. My first novel - Chasing Shadows - is about a character who kept invading my every feeble attempt at writing something serious. I g...