On Writing
The Hero’s Trauma and Life-Transforming Journey
We’re continuing with the hero’s journey, and today I want to tell you about the trauma that awakens the hero and catapults him or her along their journey. The trauma can be a death (especially one that is unexpected or sudden), a divorce or split, job loss, illness...
The Antidote for Suicide
I know why a person commits suicide. Regardless of their situation or their circumstance, there is a single thread that runs through them all. The Centers for Disease Control released a study that concluded suicide rates have risen nearly 30% in the United States...
When Reality Isn’t
Watch the video at the bottom of this blog or visit https://youtu.be/Csrn0wd5Ky8. We often consider memories to be solid facts; framed within a moment of time, we remember actions and people as if we are watching a movie in which the scene has been filmed and...
Slaying Dragons
If you’d prefer to watch a video version of this blog, visit my YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/uJBkk6BjE6U or watch at the bottom of this blog. Heroes in real life as well as in fiction encounter a variety of dragons they must slay. Some are internal, some...
When the Hero Moves
If you'd prefer to watch the video blog, skip to the bottom or visit https://youtu.be/32-7WgA8cqI. Moving to a new location is a theme encountered from the classics to contemporary genre. In a physical move, the hero leaves behind all that he or she has known....
The Actions of our Heroes
The most common response to encountering something unexpected or potentially traumatic is to freeze. This has always been my default response to spiders. And once when I was gardening, I stood up to find myself face to face with the largest snake I’d ever seen. It had...
Change and the Hero
“In AD 1, it took 1,500 years for the amount of information in the world to double. It is now doubling at the rate of once every two years.” This quote came from How to Survive Change You Didn’t Ask For by M.J.Ryan (Conari Press, 2014). Read the entire article below,...
Finding Inspiration in Weather
The past two weeks have felt surreal with the arrival of Hurricane Matthew, the resulting storm surge and subsequent flooding in Lumberton, North Carolina. For those who have read The Tempest Murders, you'll recall that it takes place as Hurricane Irene is barreling...
The Challenges of Writing a Series
I'm very happy to introduce my guest today; award winning author Maggie Thom loves the challenge of creating a web of secrets, lies and deceit. She doesn’t want you to figure it out until the end and as someone who loves twists and turns, I can say that she always...
When Fact Is Stranger Than Fiction
For authors of suspense, the political landscape has posed some interesting challenges. It has always been a popular theme to select an enemy government that our hero must infiltrate and take down, even if it’s done in bits and pieces. Consider Ian Fleming’s James...