Blog - Page 18 of 19 - Blackbird Writers

Anne Louise Bannon Asks What’s Your Obsession?

Post author:Anne Louise Bannon
Post published:August 31, 2020
Post comments:6 Comments

Anne Louise Bannon is the author of the Old Los Angeles and Operation Quickline series. Find out more about her here. Benzi is a little tired of hearing about the current project and wants food. I've been a little obsessed these past few weeks. Actually, my husband would say I've been a lot obsessed. You see, my latest Work In Progress has taken over my brain and I'm finding it really hard to think about anything else, including blog posts like these. It's not that I don't have other work to do. My next Old Los Angeles novel, Death of…

Jeff Nania Asks Where Can You Find Peace in 2020

Post author:Jeff Nania
Post published:August 23, 2020
Post comments:7 Comments

Today, we welcome the first post from our newest Blackbird, Jeff Nania. You can find out more about him here. Living an outdoor life has served me well. The tasks and chores that are part and parcel of living in the country keep me outside and occupied in mostly productive activities. Hikes on the trail are continual sources of adventure and discovery for both humans and Labradors. Walking among the prairie blooms is unavoidably cheering, even though the world right now does not seem like such a cheery place. The author and his son, credit: Victoria Rydberg-Nania While our…

Saralyn Richard Asks are You a Christie Fan?

Post author:Saralyn Richard
Post published:August 16, 2020
Post comments:10 Comments

Saralyn Richard is the author of Murder in the One Percent. You can check her bio out here. I’m often asked the ponderous question of how I ended up writing mystery novels. As I reach back into my memory of that ambition’s long history, a few milestones emerge. Dame Agatha Christie I started reading mysteries at a very young age.I collected and read every single Agatha Christie novel and every biographical work about her.I became fascinated with the connections that bridge author and reader through the intellectual and emotional puzzle that is a mystery. I’m not the only person whose…

Avanti Centrae Tells us A Story About Stars

Post author:Avanti Centrae
Post published:August 10, 2020
Post comments:4 Comments

Avanti Centrae is the multiple-award-winning author of the VanOps thriller series. You can read more about her here. A few weeks ago, we were enjoying a socially distant vacation up in the Lake Tahoe basin, and discovered a bald mountaintop that we used to star gaze. We’d hoped to see Neowise, but the comet was already fading. Looking around the black sky, the Milky Way stood out, and the blanket of stars was so thick, it was hard to find a space between them. Using a scope, we could see Jupiter’s four moons, and the gorgeous rings around Saturn were…

Who Are Your Heroines?

Post author:Tracey S. Phillips
Post published:August 2, 2020
Post comments:5 Comments

By Tracey S. Phillips Real and Historical Women In the quiet days of quarantine, I had many opportunities to meditate on my life choices and personal behavior. I used the time for reflection on changes I wanted to see in myself and the world around me. So I considered the woman I’d like to become. Am I kind? Thoughtful? Am I a good friend? My rumination brought to mind the women I admire most. Closest to my heart, my grandmother, Lucina Moxley was my teacher and mentor in music and in life. A patron of the arts and music, she…

Margaret Mizushima asks Who are Your Furry Friends?

Post author:Margaret Mizushima
Post published:July 26, 2020
Post comments:7 Comments

Margaret Mizushima and friends Margaret Mizushima is the author of the Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries. Check out her bio here. I’ve been married to a veterinarian for almost forty years, and I’ve become accustomed to sharing my life with animals, usually dogs and cats but sometimes fish and birds. I grew up on a cattle ranch, but my family typically only had one dog at a time during my childhood, not the pack that my husband seems to need. Currently we have four dogs, which is a handful, but we love them all. We live with Hannah and Bertie, both…

Marilyn Levinson and The Cozy Mystery

Post author:Guest
Post published:July 19, 2020
Post comments:13 Comments

Marilyn Levinson is the author of the Twin Lake series under her own name and The Haunted Library series as Allison Brook. The next Haunted Library novel, Checked Out for Murder, will be released on September 8. People often ask, "What is a cozy mystery?" Well, it's a mystery that evokes a sense of coziness in the reader, a much-needed feeling these days, in the Time of the Coronavirus. But what makes a mystery a cozy? The term is believed to have originated with Agatha Christie's mysteries. Picture Miss Marple gathering clues as she chats with various neighbors in St.…

How Much Description is Enough?

Post author:Tim Chapman
Post published:July 12, 2020
Post comments:5 Comments

From Tim Chapman. Read his bio here. Some of the tools writers use to tell stories are Character, Dialogue, Voice, Point of View, Tense, Scene, and Plot. Writers hope their stories are so engaging that readers will be unaware of these tools and unaware of how the writer wrestled with them. My Blackbird peers are well versed in using the seven tools, but I have a question for them and for the readers of our stories—When it comes to setting a scene, how much description is enough? Scene tells us Who, What, Where and When. It’s the same sort of…

Why Do You Read Mysteries?

Post author:Sharon Lynn
Post published:July 5, 2020
Post comments:6 Comments

By Sharon Lynn "Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.” -Alfred Hitchcock I trace my fear of total darkness to growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona, anInternational Dark City. When the sun goes down, it is so dark you can see the Milky Way. Beautiful, but also scary when walking home at night. Catharsis The ancient Greeks knew that watching tragic drama released tension and stress in the audience. The cathartic reaction is where we experience intense emotions and then cast them off because nothing terrible actually happened to us. Modern Mystery and…

Where Have You Visited (as an armchair traveler)?

Post author:Christine DeSmet
Post published:June 29, 2020
Post comments:5 Comments

By Christine DeSmet Armchair Travelers Readers and writers are armchair travelers. We love sitting down with a book that takes us to a new place or helps us revisit a favorite place. In this special time, readers are reading even more books instead of traveling by planes, trains or automobiles. What’s on the list of the places you’ve visited in the past months via the pages of a novel or memoir? North and South My recent “travels” have included North Carolina (Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens), Afghanistan (A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini), South Africa (Born a Crime by Trevor…