Lynne Simpson

I think all writers have this problem to some degree. You scribble a reminder to yourself to research burial customs in Regency England. You come up with a great scene while you’re eating breakfast in a restaurant and jot down as much as you can on the back of envelopes and scraps of paper. You [...]

For those of you who read romance, first round voting for Dorchester Publishing’s yearly American Title Contest ends November 24th. Voting in this round is for the best first line. Good luck to Edie Ramer, who is one of the finalists! :-)

Unlike many writers, I don’t have a muse. That’s just not the way my conscious mind relates to wherever-it-is my characters and my stories come from. To paraphrase something Jody said a few years back, if a muse ever showed up around here, I’d put her (or him) to work raking leaves or folding laundry! [...]

This year, I’ve been having a lot of “Doh!” moments. One of them was realizing that the alchemical correspondences in my fantasy series had a HUGE flaw in the way I’d aligned the elements of Air and Spirit. I’ve had to rearrange the order of the books, which meant putting a story that’s only a [...]

Of the decade, even. While reading an excellent article on why a writer needs an agent, I ran across this quote: Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Ain’t THAT the truth. I could come up with enough examples from both my careers to fill a hundred blog posts. But I [...]