Posts Tagged: Writing Crime Novels

Success as a Writer Means Gathering Hyphens

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Jim Sanderson is the author of El Camino Del Rio, an amazing crime novel that has won enormous, well-deserved praise from readers, critics and authors alike. But it took a while for Jim to achieve that success... time he spent, as he puts it, gathering hyphens and adjectives. And he learned that sustaining that 'hyphenated' success is even harder. Here's his story... For years I was an “unknown writer” before I became an “unknown Texas writer.” Then, I had a very good year and had two books come out. An essay collection made me a “little-known Texas writer,” and a novel made me a “Texas mystery writer.” To succeed financially or critically, a writer needs a niche, a... more

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Jim Sanderson: How I Wrote “El Camino Del Rio”

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From a retrospect, we find that we might have been lucky enough to have lived in certain times and places that turn out to matter. I have two. In the ‘70s I was trying to be a college student in San Marcos, just underneath Austin, when Willie and Waylon invaded and made the area the redneck hippie capitol of the world. I watched, listened, smelled, and felt. I went native. Eventually, I wrote several stories and a novel about that time and place. For most of the next decade, I found myself watching, listening, smelling, and feeling an oil boom then bust in Odessa, Texas. A Texas and western history buff, I was living in a wild-west mining town: Deadwood, Denver, Helena, Virginia... more

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THE OWL: Pulling the Ultimate “All-Nighter”

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Justice Never Sleeps by author Bob Forward

The Owl books were a lot of fun to write. The concept of a private detective who didn’t sleep spawned itself almost naturally from my lifestyle at the time. I was young enough (and dumb enough) so that I would routinely stay awake for three nights in a row. I’m sure you’ve been there. You start by pulling an all-nighter for some test or work deadline. Then you stay up a second night celebrating the successful completion of aforementioned test or deadline. At which point, you are running on fumes and probably not making the best decisions. So you decide to stay up a third night just to see if you can do it. Justice Never Sleeps Somewhere in there (probably during one of those... more

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