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Zara Altair
Zara Altair
Tips to Make Supporting Characters Suspicious Supporting characters are rich tools for misdirecting your sleuth. Characters because of their secrets, lies, and coverups lead the sleuth down trails that are dead ends. How to Make Innocent Suspects Look Guilty When you observe people, you’ll notice actions and dialogue that you can use in your mystery. Keep…
The Business Side of Being an Author The business side of of being an author can be bewildering, time-consuming, and frustrating. Gabriel Mercer presents ways to keep tract of expenses and income to generate a business profit and loss pre-formatted spreadsheets for you to download and use a straightforward explanation of UTMs, how to use…

In the first act of the mystery, you laid out all your detective’s skills one by one as new situations arose. In the middle, you frustrated all those skills by exposing your sleuth’s weaknesses. Now at the end, you can bring back those skills and strengths as your detective confronts the killer. Your detective has…
Subplots in the Story Subplots add depth to your mystery story by giving readers a deeper vision of your protagonist, the detective. They can Add dimension to the main plot Test the protagonist’s motivation and ability to solve the puzzle Create different points of view on the central murder victim and suspects In a mystery,…

Be Good to Your Reader Choosing suspects for your mystery novel begins when you flesh out your story idea in the planning stages. As you create your character bible adding suspects to your mystery novel you aim for a balance between enough characters to challenge your sleuth and your reader and too few suspects. If your mystery has only two or three suspects your reader won’t feel challenged. You will be challenged creating material to flesh out a novel of 65,000 to 85,000 wor […]
The Secret Sauce of Fellow Writers Fellow writers provide a rich source of knowledge. You can use this knowledge to expand yours. From writing groups to indie author idea exchanges you can build your personal knowledge base on writing and publishing skills. New writers, especially, can fall into the trap of spending hundreds and sometimes…