writing

How Do You Handle Foreign Languages in Books?

Asking the audience this time. Often when I’m writing, the characters I’m dealing speak more than one language. In Don’t Go to Sleep, Gia and Enzo are both Italian, so there’s no going around it: they’re going to speak Italian at some point. (Likely even more often than I portray in the book.) My approach to date has been to put the foreign words and sentences in exactly as they would say them. (I used to italicize them, to denote it was a foreign word, but I stopped that when a friend pointed out it made those words too .

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2023 Vacation Report: Researching Murder

I never really set out to be a horror writer. Or a thriller writer. Or an historical serial killer writer, which I suppose is as close to a descriptor of my current books as you can get. When left to my own devices, I think I tend toward a more humorous slant, but that’s not how the publishing world works. The books I’ve been writing that have found the largest audience are much more macabre, and so here I am. Not that I’m complaining. Writing is writing, I’ve found, and one of the things I also love is researching. Writing

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Picking My Next Project

Earlier this week, I finished the current draft of the project I’d been working on since last February(!) It ended up being around 90,000 words (though I’d cut it down from around 110,000). (Doing a bit of math, that’s 347 writing days since I started the project. At 1,000 words/day, I should have gotten 347,000 words written. There was a lot more start/stop/start/stop to this project than I would have liked.) In any case, that leaves me in the spot of “what do I write next?” In many ways, it feels a lot like how I feel when I’m trying

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Ramping Up the Writing

I’ve written already about how much my writing slipped in the fall last year. It was for a variety of reasons, but I tried to give myself the leeway to have that slow time and not beat myself up about it too much. For the most part, I was successful. However, it also means that I’m not as far into my current novel as I would like to be. That’s not really going to fly for me right now, so I’m pretty set on getting caught up with this book. If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s having a

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Writing Progress

I’ll be honest, the last three and a half months have been very rough for me, from a writing perspective. All through COVID, I was able to keep on soldiering forward. 1,000 words a day. It helped that I had a very definite deadline I was working toward for some of it, and that I was well into writing and revising Don’t Go to Sleep. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to churn through my words, whatever else might be happening in my life. But that project ended, and I faced the dreaded What Do I Write Next phase

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