Authors Electric

I was invited to be a speaker on a few panels last weekend at the California Creative Writing Conference , one of which was on world-building. I'm old. I admit it. And back-in-the-day I don’t remember us calling it world-building. Part of that is, I think, because all authors of all stories world-build to a certain extent. For me, the world begins within the character. And, crazy as it may sound, I think of that when I look around me, right now, at my little desk in the corner of my bedroom. And there is the Brownie doll my brother gave me for Christmas when I was six. And there is my movie poster from  The Darjeeling Limited.  And there is my orange cherub lamp, on my wooden desk with the pipe legs, and I sit in a wide-backed wicker chair like a minor Bond villain. It is my world. It exudes from me, which sounds slightly gross, I know, but it does. I have moved house a fair amount of times in my life, and, once in a new place, tend to shake the whole thing up at l...

Phyllis Page hero, writer Nellie Bly, 1888 Frank saw her as a pest at first. They met about halfway into Oddly Dead , my second Phantom Eye mystery novel. One-eyed PI Frank Ritz was questioning the caretakers of a hideaway aerie tucked into a chaparral-covered canyon high above Beverly Hills searching for its missing owner, 1960s all-American screen sweetheart Sally Pope. Someone else had the same idea.  “This is Phyllis Page. She’s from the L.A. Times ... ,” said one of the caretakers.  “Sorry for barging in. Your front door was open.” The young woman excused herself too shyly for a reporter. She was round-faced, with short-cropped, auburn bangs and freckles, wearing blue-jeans and a white shirt with a yellow kerchief, high-top tennis shoes, and carried a note pad under one arm –  too collegiate for the City Room, I thought – a regular Nancy Drew who would turn glamorous when she took off her steel-rimmed glasses.  I'm terrible at planning, organizing and outlinin...