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A strange message, a deserted beach house, a long-lost friend in trouble …
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How I Found a Ghost for my Ghost Story
In my folktale collection Leaving Birds, the longest story ‘Peig’s Place’ evolved by combining three unique ingredients: personal experience, research into true encounters with ghosts, and the perfect superstition from Irish folklore to give this modern story its chilling twist. Along the way, I met the ghost who haunts 'Peig's Place'. Read more >
Help me write a story
To date, the Selkie Moon Series consists of one prequel, Laying Ghosts, and four novels starting with The First Lie. The books follow Selkie’s mysterious and mystical journey of self-discovery around the world. I’m recruiting my fans to help me write a second prequel, exploring events that happen between Laying Ghosts and The First Lie. Read more >
The Bottomless Black Hole of Ideas
Ideas are everywhere. But it takes some practice to notice them, then add a dash of imagination to tweak them into something bigger. In this post, I explain how the weird and unexpected turned up when I was doing something else. I’m using it as a springboard for creating clues and threads in Selkie Moon’s next mystery, with a little help from her fans ... Read more >
The Mysterious Key
There’s something inherently mysterious about keys. They’ve played a role in many folktales. Perhaps the most famous folktale key is the one that opens the locked room in "Bluebeard". Bluebeard’s naïve new wife is given the keys to every room in the house, but there’s one room her husband forbids her to open – and the key burns a hole in her curiosity until she can no longer resist. She discovers the room’s terrible secret – the skeletons of all Bluebeard’s former wives. Then she can’t un-see what she’s seen, and the key won’t stop bleeding all over everything, giving away her transgression. Can she escape her terrible fate? Read more >
The Stalker's Guide to French Wine
In The Second Path, Book Two in the Selkie Moon mystery series, Selkie is confronted by a number of bizarre and cryptic clues which lead her across the world to France. As the story evolved, some of my experiences from several recent three-month stays in France added depth to the story. As my husband and I drove from Bordeaux airport, north through the Dordogne, to Tours in the Loire Valley we contracted the flu, la grippe catastrophe. About an hour after arriving in Tours we were stricken and didn’t get out of bed for eleven days. Almost. After nine days of dry toast we decided a bottle of French wine was what the doctor forgot to order. Read more >
Book Too Short!
It’s what no-one wants to experience – a book that’s too short. We get to the end and feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled by the quality of the journey. If we want to get lost in a book, it has to be a ‘magnificent forest’, not a ‘mean little wood’. But what if the book that's too short isn't the book you're reading. That's bad enough. What if it's the book you're ... writing? What then? Read more >
Behind the Scenes of an Audio Book
Ten Steps to Creating the Audio Book for The First Lie: When I decided to commission an audio book for The First Lie I was in for a great adventure. Publishers take charge of creating audio books for their authors, but independent authors like me get involved in the whole rewarding process. Read more >
Five Ways that an Idea is Like a Ghost
Charles Dickens said, “An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” Readers often ask where writers get their ideas and I love this quote because ideas really are like ghosts ... Read more >
A Boozy Lunch and a Notebook
To make Selkie Moon a modern woman capable of facing escalating threats, I invited five young women to share their secrets with me over lunch. Read more >
Ten Ways that Furniture Moving is like Mystery Writing
Moving furniture is about sorting items to keep and throwing others out. It's about rearranging things in a pleasing way. It's the same with mystery writing. Read more >
The Magic of Mistakes
How could mistakes made during the writing process add extra depth to an unfolding story? Read more >
Mystery Bundle Winner is Announced
A winner of the Mystical Mystery bundle has been chosen -- three prize-winning mystical mysteries will be posted to her soon. Read more >
Guest Post: Where Truth and Imagination Impact
A ticking clock that isn't there. In this guest post, prize-winning author Marion Eaton recounts strange but true events that evolve into her fiction. Read more >
Trusting Chaos (Part One)
How can writing a first draft be like improv? In this guest post, award-winning author Amber Foxx explains her process. Read more >
Writing Backwards
When something unexpected turns up in my writing, I let it sit there until I discover perhaps chapters later why it's there. Read more >
Cozying up to Clichés
Writers are warned to avoid clichés 'like the plague' but clichés can be the first step in a creative process that leads to fresh thoughts and original writing. Read more >
What the Indie Author borrows from Jekyll and Hyde
Writing and marketing use different kinds of energy. How does the indie author focus on their writing and market their published books without splitting in two? Read more >
Five Great Reasons to Give E-books this Christmas
You may not have thought of this gift idea. It's personal, easy and fun. Read more >
The Editing Process Revealed: "The Quick Read"
Book Two of the Selkie Moon Mystery Series is just back from the editor and "the quick read" has led to lively discussions and blood on the floor. Read more >
A BRAG Medallion for "The First Lie"
The Book Readers Appreciation Group has just awarded "The First Lie" its coveted BRAG Medallion as a top-rated self-published book. Read more >
Being Alert to Serendipity
This sounds like a contradiction – surely serendipity means being surprised, a state you can’t really prepare for. But serendipity creeps up on writers all the time and goes right past the ones who aren’t awake to it. Read more >
Why Characters should be Mysterious to the Author
Real people are mysterious – we think we know someone and they surprise us. So should our characters. Read more >
How is an Idea Like a Ghost?
Charles Dickens said, “An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.” Read more >
How a Setting Becomes a Character
If an author gets inside the skin of a place, the setting can behave like a character in the novel. Read more >
Why You Should "Lose" Chapter One
Before a work of fiction is published, the author should "lose" the first chapter and start the book in Chapter Two. Read more >
The Mystery of Mystery Writing
How does a writer create the unpredictability that's needed for a mystery to be mysterious? Read more >
How Friends Become Characters
Careful what you say to a writer. You might find yourself in their next book. Read more >
How Magic Magnifies Reality
Magic can add a whole new dimension of "reality" to an otherwise contemporary story firmly planted in the real. Read more >
The Book I've Read Ten Times
"The Girl in a Swing" by Richard Adams haunted me so much as a reader that I reread it ten times to see how he'd done it. Read more >
Selkie Goes to Paris!
Selkie's work as a seminar presenter takes her around the world, where she's a magnet for mysteries and secrets. Read more >
Tension in the Author = Tension for the Reader
The writing of Book Two of the series is bubbling along with the usual twists and turns, but is there enough tension? Read more >
Leave Out the Boring Bit
In Elmore Leonard's ten rules of writing he famously advises writers to "try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip". Read more >
Look No Plot!
Many writing workshops concentrate on plotting as the key to a well-structured novel but for me it’s the death of creativity. I’m in good company. Read more >
The Link between Writing and Sanity
These days the writer who chooses to self-publish must be a marketer, a social networker and a blogger. This is a challenge for me because my default mode is also ‘hermit’. Read more >
Why Hawaii?
People ask me why I set “The First Lie” in Hawaii. The great writing mantra is ‘write what you know’, but I’ve learned the exhilaration of the opposite –‘write what you don’t know’. Read more >
Fifteen Minutes of Fame
“The First Lie” shocked me today by popping up in two bestseller lists in the Australian Kindle store. Being seen by new readers is essential for a new series – and with 2.5 million ebooks it’s almost impossible. Read more >
