Features
Elizabeth Hand on Playwriting, Haunted Houses, and Shirley Jackson
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This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. A Haunting on the Hill is now available from Mulholland Books. Olivia Rutigliano: I’m so excited because this is the…
Love Behind Bars: On the Complicated World of Incarcerated Romance
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Of all the correspondents I’ve had in my life, Sam Israel has been among the most consistent. Sam was serving a twenty-two-year sentence in federal prison for fraud when…
Rhys Bowen on Using Real Experiences As Inspiration
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My new book, The Proof of the Pudding, is the 17th in the series featuring Lady Georgiana, 35th in line to the throne in the nineteen thirties. When I…
Psychology Is Important For Motivation, But Your Characters Need More Than Diagnoses
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I teach creative writing at a public arts high school in Chicago. If you’re picturing Fame, with students breaking into song and dance in the hallways, you’re not far…
On Horror and Humanity’s Enduring Love Affair with Fear
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Hold, friend. I only have fifteen hundred words to save your life. You and I are bound in a bargain spanning hundreds of years, across dozens of types of…
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…
Wilderness Thrillers Featuring Fearless Women
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I’m what you might call a mini-adventurer. I’ve climbed rockfaces, rafted rivers, backpacked into the wilderness and once slithered through a cave tunnel so tight that the only way…
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,…