beth daniels

Breaking the 4th Wall does not require a sledgehammer or major machines of destruction driven by folks wearing hard hats. Its something a Beta reader or member of your critique group or an editor might have chided you about. When my first urban fantasy PI mystery comedy, RAVEN’S MOON, went to...

The phrase has been around for a long time: THINK OUTSIDE OF THE BOX! And in the current world of publishing, particularly in genre fiction, it’s fairly clear that quite a lot of writers have done just that. There were, after all, very few books published, compared to the numbers today, in urban...

How do you get from page one to the final page in your novel, novella, or short story? You treat it like you would when making vacation plans, that’s how. Or, at least, it’s one way to look at it. And it’s the way I look at the journey when writing – in particular when it comes to my novels...

*** Registration is now full. *** You’ve no doubt heard of many different ways of plotting a piece of genre fiction. Things like outlines, beat sheets, three act play, and who knows what else. But have you ever considered math as a guideline? Hang out with Beth Daniels, author of 30 published...

Ask a veteran author about the importance of creating a strong and cohesive plot with a solid GMC and they'll tell you it's key to sustaining a long and rewarding publishing career. Don't let your book fall into an agent or editor's the slush pile with a weak plot and unmotivated characters...

Time is short, and you really need to write something to keep your hand in the game. You could inch your way through a novel length tale. But you could also be writing short stories. If you’ve been pounding out tales of 50,000 words, 85,000 words, or over 100,000 words, scaling back to the...

When it comes to writing mysteries, there are probably far more that fall under the umbrella of being a series than there are those that are standalone titles. A series, after all, can suck readers into your fictional world and keep them coming back for more and more and more. But writing a...