thriller Archives - Blackbird Writers

Laurie Stevens asks Do You Write Weather?

Post author:Laurie Stevens
Post published:October 11, 2021
Post comments:22 Comments

Laurie Stevens is the author of the Gabriel McRae series. You can find out more about her here, buy her books here, and read her last post here. As I write this, thunder rolls through a warm night. For some of you, this is no big deal. For a Southern California native like me, it’s unusual. It brings to mind the wet thickness of a summer night in Louisiana (I’m a fan of New Orleans). The sky usually doesn’t talk like this where I live, and I like it, so I have to pay homage in this blog to the…

Sherrill Joseph asks, “Mystery or . . . Suspense?”

Post author:Sherrill Joseph
Post published:September 13, 2021
Post comments:28 Comments

Sherill Joseph is the author of the Botanic Hill Detectives Mystery series for middle grades readers. You can find out more about her here, see her books here, or read her last post here. The famous film director Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE (1899-1980) proudly bore the title the “Master of Suspense.” Suspense surpasses mystery in making my stomach lurch and my heart pound. Interestingly, suspense can be both terrifying and exhilarating. "Sacramento, California, USA - March 21, 2012: A 1998 USA postage stamp with a portrait of movie director and producer Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980). Suspense is defined as “a…

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…

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…