Years ago, when I began writing for Harlequin, I started out in the romantic comedy lines, particularly the imprint that required its couple to get together through some strange form of communication. The guidelines for that were changed pretty quickly, and the line went belly-up pretty quickly, as well. I don’t think the editors could have anticipated the strangeness that was about to take hold of communications. I know, I didn’t.

I was talking to my friend, Julie Rowe (North of Heartbreak by Carina press), a couple days before she left her home somewhere near the North Pole and ventured south, to the distant land of Chicago, to the RT Convention. I didn’t have time to go RT this year, but I live only a couple hours south, in Indy, so we decided to meet in Chicago and play for a few hours. Anyway, the subject of contacting each other when I got there came up.

E-mailing was out of the question since I wasn’t lugging my laptop along. Julie wanted me to call her because she doesn’t like texting, and believe it or not, I still like a good phone call every now and then, even though in my family, phone calls are pretty obsolete. For example, my oldest doesn’t call, but she texts me several times a week because her “plan” includes unlimited texting, but phone calls are pretty pricey. No landline in her house, by the way. And there’s my middle child who never, let me repeat never, answers her phone. You want to communicate with her, you text her. Phones calls cost extra on her phone plan (what’s that about?) and again, no landline.

Then there’s my other one – not my kid, but might as well be. Read more…

While I had written a series of faith-and-family stories before I wrote ABBY FINDS HER CALLING, taking on a whole new genre about a culture who prefers to remain removed from worldly things (such as fiction!) requires fresh research, different methods—and, most definitely, on-site, hands-on experience among Amish folks.

While, yes, the Internet provides a lot of easily accessed information, there’s no substitute for being inside an Amish home or hearing the clip-clop, clip-clop of those beautiful horses’ hooves as a buggy transports you to another place and time—even though you don’t, in reality, leave the present day!

True enough, I immersed myself in dozens of Amish novels by Beverly Lewis, Cindy Woodsmall, Marta Perry, and other authors to get a feel for these stories before I submitted my proposal for the Home at Cedar Creek series. I knew immediately that these authors had an advantage because they lived near Lancaster County and/or had family who used to be Amish, so I looked for an angle that would set my series apart.

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Feature Article by Lawrence Block

This article first appeared in the 1981 Writer’s Yearbook. Yes, there are some dated references, but information is still relevant. I was honored that Mr. Block allowed me to reprint it here. It’s also included in the  The Liar’s Bible. Enjoy!

A writer, James Michener has said, can make a fortune in America. But he can’t make a living.

I think the point is good. It’s hardly a secret that a few people get rich every year at their typewriters. The same media attention that 50 years ago lionized a handful of writers as important cultural leaders now trumpets the income of a comparable handful. The tabloid reader knows nowadays about paperback auctions and movie tie-ins and multi-volume book contracts with sky-high advances and elevator clauses.

Balanced against this image of the writer as fortune’s darling is a similarly glamorous picture of the unsuccessful writer starving in an airless garret, eating baked beans out of the can and pawning his overcoat to buy carbon paper. The poor blighter’s starving for his art, and he’ll either go on starving in pursuit of his pure artistic vision until they lay his bones in potter’s field, or else he’ll suddenly break through to literary superstardom, and the next we’ll see of him he’ll be at poolside sipping champagne and snorting lines with the Beautiful People.

The validity of both of these images notwithstanding, most of the writers I know have never gotten rich but have always gotten by. This has certainly been the case with me. I have, to be sure, had good years and bad years. I had a couple of years when I made more money than I knew what to do with—although I always thought of something—and I had other years, and rather more of them, when I might have switched to another line of work had there been anything else for which I was qualified.

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Lots of authors write without plotting first, which is what I do.  I’ve survived so far, but it’s a lot of work, especially if you decide to start writing in a genre you’ve never written in before and you have no idea what you’re doing.  Such was the case when I began writing The Forbidden Bean, the first book in a fantasy series called Grinding Reality.

After working for a worldwide coffee chain for several years I thought I could use my experience there for more than creating a perfect caramel macchiato.

By consuming a magic coffee bean, most of the main character’s thinking, rational self goes with her when she is temporarily transformed into the body of something else.  The rest of her is left behind in her human state blindly operating on auto-pilot. She starts out small in the first book, when she is zapped into the bodies of various insects without warning.  (Did you ever want to be a fly on a wall?)

She learns all kinds of information she’d rather not know which sets her on a reluctant superhero path as she pursues a ragtag gang of Eastern European criminals and sees justice done to a serial killer.

Consider a writer who doesn’t plot, writing in a new genre, writing the first book in a series (she’s never written a series before, either) and who has no idea where the story is going until she gets to the end.  That was the story of my life the entire time I worked on The Forbidden Bean.

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