Craft
Fighting Toxic Masculinity Through Young Adult Fiction
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When I was dreaming up the plot of my latest young adult thriller, The Revenge Game, I posed the following research question to my social media followers: “It’s hard to phrase, but did you ever experience kids at school/camp participating in, like, sexual conquest competitions? Example: at my camp, the *cool kids* would rank the…
How to Edit a Series of Crime Novellas with 30 Different Authors and Come Out the Other Side Feeling Grateful
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Talk to anyone who has edited an anthology, planned a Noir at the Bar, or even just tried to figure out where to go for dinner, and you’ll get the same sentiment—where writers are concerned, organizing anything is like herding cats. Except it really isn’t true. I mean, it is true where an anthology is…
Lee Goldberg on Westerns, Crime Novels, and Writing A Genre Mash-Up
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I’ve always loved crime novels and westerns. I’ve written dozens of crime novels, but not any westerns. Or so I thought. A few years ago, at a book signing event for one of my “Eve Ronin” series of police procedurals, a reader told me I was her favorite western author, which I thought was a…
From Sports Reporter to Crime Writer
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Ask me why I created a female sports reporter protagonist and the answer is easy. That’s my background. I intimately know the character’s experiences—the smell of the locker rooms, the chit chat with a camera operator and the adrenaline rush of a newsroom. Ask me why I decided to write a thriller—well, that question stumped…
James Kennedy: “Storytellers are manipulative cult leaders.”
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I missed my chance to be in a cult. In my twenties, a guy on the street handed me a pamphlet to join a “communal farm”—an obvious cult. Nevertheless, I was intrigued: maybe I could enjoy this farm’s bucolic vibes and free love, while shrewdly avoiding any mass suicide, or baby-eating, or barnyard chores. I…
Sudden Death and the Startlement of Absence
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Sudden Death is a dirty business. It touches you, and there’s no rubbing it off. Scrub until you bleed. No dice—it remains. Maybe that’s why I keep writing about it. A Southern California summer in ‘93. I remember blades of grass on the bottoms of my feet. Morning dew between my toes, and sunshine on…
How Unlikeable Characters Freed Me From Perfectionism
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I’m hardly the first author to call herself a perfectionist. In fact, I’m sure many of us were once described as “a pleasure to have in class”—which, for me, meant straight As, crippling social anxiety, and a paralyzing fear of getting in trouble. My literary role models were Nancy Drew, Matilda, and Ella (of Enchanted…
Confessions of a Serial Anthology Editor
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My parents moved to Paris in France for work when I was only three years old. As a result, not only did I become bilingual (and was once capable of writing in both languages) but I spent much of my first two decades navigating between France and England as a result. In my early teens,…