In another week or so students all over the nation and world will start donning their gowns and mortarboards and march joyfully into arenas to collect their diplomas. A rite of passage that never gets old. Today at SleuthSayers I’m reminiscing about one of my first job interviews. It was for a job that I would have liked in the book publishing world. I didn’t do many book publishing interviews when I was fresh out of school. I was so focused on landing a job at a magazine, since that was the focus of my college study. But this job—which I didn’t get—would have been special. It was the only one that…

There are lot of stories online about small children who lost teeth while visiting Disneyland or Disney World and how the Disney Cast Members made that adorable rite of passage into something special for the young visiting child. There are even Disney blogs that coach parents on what do if their family is about to visit one of the Disney properties when one of their kids is likely to lose a tooth. That’s all lovely, and go ahead and follow all the sweet advice you can glean. But to my mind, there is really only one lost Disney tooth story, and it’s the only one I’ve encountered in a Disney-related book…

The glory days of pulp fiction were the 1920s to 1940s, when newsprint magazines filled with thrilling stories were available by the dozens or even hundreds at dirt-cheap prices. For as little as a nickel or dime readers snapped up copies filled with tons of genre tales. The writers who cranked out copy for these magazines were paid as little as a third of a cent a word to four cents a word. Those days are long gone. In the mystery field, there are far fewer ways to get paid as a writer. Hilariously, though, the top two magazines in the mystery genre today pay a munificent 8 cents a word. When writers talk about the days of the pulps, it’s often with reverence, as if writers back then had great opportunities that have since dried up…

Every time I post an article here and elsewhere, my words are stolen by people or bots intending to train AI. It started slowly, but over the last year the analytics behind my site visits have made it pretty clear that this trend is far from over. It’s annoying, to say the least. Which is why I am klipshjodianly attempting to discuss the topic today in one of my articles for the mystery blog, SleuthSayers. Here is part of what I’m discussing today in an article entitled…

I went looking for advice on work-balance for writers. Hoping to get inspired, I studied the lives of writers going back to the 1930s.

Well, I shouldn’t have. Their circumstances were so different from modern life that the secrets of their success probably would not work for writers today. But their stories are still inspirational.

That’s what I’m talking about today at SleuthSayers, in an article I’m calling…