Posts Tagged: To Kill a Mockingbird

WRITING OLD ANGER: The Heart of the Matter in a Southern Crime Story

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Phillip Thompson's crime novel Outside the Law scored wide acclaim from critics and major league authors like David Morrell, Linwood Barclay and Reed Farrel Coleman. Now the long-awaited sequel, Old Anger, is now available and is already scoring raves from Publishers Weekly, and authors like Joe R. Lansdale and S.A. Cosby. Phillip stopped by to share with us the story behind the story.... Writing about race in the Deep South is never easy. Especially during the tumult of 2020. I am white. Born and raised in Mississippi. I was a youngster growing up when the state was going through the painful ending of the American apartheid called “segregation” or “separate but equal.” And... more

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GRAVEN IMAGES: Finding Garner Quinn’s Voice

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Jane Waterhouse's writing has been described by Booklist "as lyrical as a lullaby and as eerily hypnotic as a cobra’s dance" and those talents are very much on display in her blockbuster thriller GRAVEN IMAGES. Here she tells us how she created the heroine, Garner Quinn, and developed the story. GRAVEN IMAGES  was originally written in the third person. Reading through my first draft of the manuscript it hit me like a ton of bricks—Oh crap. This is a first-person story. But it had taken me months to get to this point and I wasn’t ready to give up control to some imagined character just yet. So I struck a bargain with my protagonist, Garner Quinn. I said I’d go back to page one... more

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