Television dramas like NCIS often feature ensemble casts. That is, a half dozen or so individuals “star” in the series, rather than just one or two. This ena...

I am about one-third of the way through the fifth novel in my Rebecca Series. How do I know? Two ways. One, of course, the word count on my laptop shows abou...

Books, movies, television… the creators of suspenseful stories take widely differing approaches to letting us, the readers and viewers, know “who done it.” F...

I know that question sounds ridiculous. But hear me out. I’m reading a new book titled Becoming C. S. Lewis, by Dr. Harry Lee Poe (Crossway, 2019). As you ca...

By most people in the world, C. S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia stories for children. But he wrote many kinds of books. His Ransom Trilogy – also known...

Time gets “juggled” in two ways in my novels. First, the action usually takes place on more than one continent, separated by the Atlantic Ocean and five – so...

Almost every major character, good or bad, gets wounded or, in a few cases, actually killed, at some point in my stories, both in the adult and in the young-...

A lot of things – good and bad – can happen below the surface of the ground or of the water. In the novel I’m working on now, a labyrinth of tunnels under th...

Three breeds of highly intelligent dogs appear in my fourth novel for adults, which is titled Choose You This Day. Since many readers are not as familiar wit...

“Th’ bg! Th’ bg! Dt’r Stf’d’s bg! H’r sh’s w’r unt’d! Th’ w’r unt’d!” What? What dialect is that? What language is that? Well, it’s English, but before I tra...

In Part One of this two-part post, I wrote about how novels are often pieced together. And I mentioned that, in the first two novels in C. S. Lewis’s Ransom ...

Whenever I am a guest teacher for an hour or so in a high-school or middle-school English class, I usually pull a novel off of the shelves in the classroom –...

When my first novel was completed – when it was still just a manuscript – it moved from the managing editor’s desk to the desk of a young copy editor. A defi...

I have already mentioned in an earlier post that the characters in my novels – adult novels and young-adult novels alike – are not based on actual people. I ...

You may or may not know that there are artists who specialize in creating book covers. It’s what they do to earn their living. Other artists, although not co...

Occasionally I – like other authors – get thank-you notes from people who have read one of my novels. They sometimes write, “I really enjoyed your book.” Occ...

What do authors think about when choosing names for the characters in their novels? This is a question I get often at book signings or in classrooms. People ...

Near the end of my second adult-level novel – the second in the Rebecca Series – we read this passage: The gunman, kicking wildly at her face and chest, trie...

I mentioned in an earlier entry that I am always appreciative if an author chooses to work a background romance into a mystery or action story. I wrote that ...

Adult readers at my book signings, or students in classrooms, often ask me what I like to read. I’m not sure what other fiction writers read, but I know that...