Jeannette de Beauvoir 11/20/24 Jeannette de Beauvoir 11/20/24

Good-bye to a storyteller

Best known for a crime fiction series with supernatural elements set in the Welsh borders, he wrote what I think of as multidimensional stories—stories you can read and enjoy on a superficial level, but which can also draw you in deeper to consider your own beliefs and values.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 11/20/24 Jeannette de Beauvoir 11/20/24

What happens when you get a bad review?

Every book, at one time or another, gets a bad review.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 7/31/24 Jeannette de Beauvoir 7/31/24

Write Like an Actor

How would an actor approach your protagonist? How would they take your description and the situation into which you’ve plunged the character, and make that character unforgettable?

Jeannette de Beauvoir 7/3/24 Jeannette de Beauvoir 7/3/24

Why Stories?

Yes, it’s true: I live in my head. Wherever my current story ideas take me. To Cuba or Nepal or California. With people who sing, or tend cows, or—sometimes—commit murder. And those places and those people are real. They may not even make it out of my head, but for the time they’re there? They are still very real.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 6/22/24 Jeannette de Beauvoir 6/22/24

What’s in a Name?

My characters come to life as I write, not before. They shift and morph and often change the entire narrative arc of my stories. They become who they are in chapter five, or eight, or ten. So the name I started with generally just doesn’t fit the character as they emerge, as they talk with other characters, as they make choices, as they tell me where the book needs to go.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 5/12/24 Jeannette de Beauvoir 5/12/24

Stuck? Try a Character Tarot Read!

Doing a Tarot read for one or more of your characters is a terrific way of seeing them in another light, giving you ideas for their personalities and histories, and providing a little more depth to the way you write them for your readers.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 1/25/24 Jeannette de Beauvoir 1/25/24

Meet Me at the Mall?

I’ve always been fascinated with abandoned human structures, but as I mentioned, I’ve never seen any that rose and fell within my own lifetime as completely as malls, and so I find myself drawn to photographs and videos of these gargantuan empty places once echoing with so much life.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 12/12/23 Jeannette de Beauvoir 12/12/23

Get Your Wheels on the Ground

My first drafts are a mess. I have an occasionally faulty memory, and so nothing exists in my world until it’s written down. Because of that, I have all sorts of ideas I throw into the mix of a first draft. Some won’t stay the course. Some are frankly contradictory to other ideas I slammed down elsewhere in the manuscript. A few take on the glitter of inspiration and stay in place through publication.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 10/10/23 Jeannette de Beauvoir 10/10/23

Something Scary in Time for Halloween!

When placed around a word or phrase as in these examples, they’re called “scare quotes” ... and, man, are they scary!

Jeannette de Beauvoir 12/4/22 Jeannette de Beauvoir 12/4/22

Is AI the Beginning or the End?

I’m not worried—yet. AI can’t do what I can do—yet. Computers can’t just create stories in a void; instead, they’re given a massive number of exemplars—works that are similar to what the computer is tasked to create—which is then broken down into data. AI reads the data using statistical algorithms to recognize patterns and relationships.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 11/3/22 Jeannette de Beauvoir 11/3/22

Finding Your Writer's Voice — Part One

And of course every event we experience, especially crisis events, changes us. And that affects how we express ourselves.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 4/1/22 Jeannette de Beauvoir 4/1/22

Decluttering Your Writing Past

So, I decided, it’s time to clean out that folder. Trash the stuff that didn’t work then, doesn’t work now, will never in this lifetime even have a stab at working. It’s an interesting journey, back into the early days of my storing my work in bytes rather than paper pages, and some of it has not aged well.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 4/11/21 Jeannette de Beauvoir 4/11/21

Scary Fun

Like a roller-coaster ride at a fun-fair, fiction allows us to experience terror without it being real, without it having any lasting impact on our lives; we become voyeurs in horror, safe in the knowledge that it’s not true.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 3/28/21 Jeannette de Beauvoir 3/28/21

Storms, Wrecks, and the Splendid Isolation of Writing

Writers think and create in isolation. Your isolation is really your workspace. No matter where you are physically, you’re simultaneously alone: it’s in your mental solitude that you build your story, that you interact with your characters, that you listen to the inner narrative voice guiding your craft. Isolation isn’t optional; it’s essential.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 2/14/21 Jeannette de Beauvoir 2/14/21

Why Read About Murder?

We mystery readers really, really like to read about death. Suspicious deaths, orchestrated deaths, clever deaths, carefully planned deaths. What is up with that?

Jeannette de Beauvoir 12/14/20 Jeannette de Beauvoir 12/14/20

Do You Have Title Envy?

Most authors function perfectly well putting the story first, and that actually may be exactly the way it should be. Yet here I remain.

Jeannette de Beauvoir 11/25/20 Jeannette de Beauvoir 11/25/20

Finding Stories by Excavating the Past

There’s nothing more annoying than reading a novel and coming across a glaring mistake—it makes you lose trust in the writer. So it’s always been important for me to create fiction that nestles inside fact, so to speak.