Jessica and I just got back from our annual ghost-hunting excursion at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. For those of you unfamiliar with this tradition, for the past six years I’ve gone to the famously haunted hotel to do some writing and search for ghosts,...
I pay attention when another author's book captivates my attention. I'll analyze the detail, pace, prose, and voice, and try to figure out what exactly it was that grabbed me. (Sometimes the opposite is true: I'll read a terrible book and obsess over how it became...
Happy New Year and new decade! This is the time of year I walk into my hometown gym and there's twice as many people as usual. Everyone's ready for the new year. New resolutions, fresh dose of determination. But did you know less than 10% of people keep their New...
Rejoice, as the Halloween highlight reel is here. As my long-term readers know, each year I comb though video footage to collect the choicest screams from my Halloween house-staging. This was the first year I moved the set from the porch to inside the garage, allowing...
My readers know what I write: dark psychological suspense, sometimes tinged with horror. The space of fiction in which I exist is a cold, barely lit world where paranoia rules and people quite occasionally die—a place where trust is a rare commodity, hope is even more...
Mid-July is when the Halloween nightmares start. The recurring dream is that it's 6 P.M. on Halloween night, kids are walking toward my house, and I totally forgot to decorate. I haven't put out one goddamn thing. My body is frozen in place, so I can't even get a...
My publisher bought my book The Dead Girl in 2A in 2018, though when I sold it that wasn’t its title. My working title was The Orphan List, but my editor wanted a different name (this is very common) and she came up with the finalized version. The “girl” in the title...
Storytelling is 20% idea and 80% mood. When I set out to write a story, I never have a fully formed vision of what the plot will be, but I know how I want the story to feel. Of course, moods shift scene to scene throughout a novel, but there should be one pervasive...
I love to swear. It's truly one of life's pleasures, but that doesn't mean my potty mouth should always make its way into my writing. Everyone has an opinion about profanity in books, and authors have a balancing act to perform when it comes to how much of it, if...
