If You Don't Know Your Burro from a Burrow

For today's post, I'm updating and expanding a column I wrote for the Criminal Brief mystery blog many moons ago. If you never saw that post I'm not surprised, and if you did see it and still don't remember it, I don't blame you. I barely remember it myself, and I wrote it. But some of the points it illustrated seem to be as applicable to our writing and to our use of language now as they were back then, and I look forward to seeing what you might think of them. So here goes:

Two guys are sitting in a tavern, sipping their beers. One says to the other, "See that girl at the end of the bar? I think I'll ask her for a date."

The second guy takes a look and says, "Forget it. She won't be interested."

"How do you know?"

"Because she's a lesbian."

"So?" the first guy says. "It won't matter. Watch this."

He stands, struts over to the young lady, leans on the bar, and says, "Hi, darlin'. How are things in Beirut?"

Yes, I know, it's an old joke, and dumb too. But I think, as mentioned above, it makes a point. The point is,  most of us don't have very good vocabularies.

With the assistance of several books and articles on the subject, I have attempted to list a few word-choice and style mistakes we writers often make--and how to avoid them. Among my references are Lapsing Into a Comma and The Elephants of Style by Bill Walsh, "Words That Wound" from the now-defunct Byline Magazine, and Woe Is I by Patricia T. O'Conner.

NOTE: Some of the following are firm rules, and some are informed opinions. Others are my own opinions, which are usually uninformed. As an example, I have writer friends who insist that T-shirts should be tee shirts, or just tees; I don't agree, but I do think it's good to hear and consider others writers' and readers' observations on that and on other matters of word usage. I ain't no grammar policeman, but I do know people who is.

Continuous/continual -- Continuous means without interruption. Continual means frequently or often repeated. The entire film was made up of one continuous scene. The bill died after continual objections. 

Historic/historical -- Historic means something that's famous or important. Historical just means something that happened in the past. My book launches were historical events; the Apollo launches were historic events.

Hone in/home in -- You can hone your knife or your skills, but you can't hone in on something. The investigator homed in on the fact that Judy was in town the night of the murder. Think homing beacons.

Till -- The word till is an informal version of until, not a contraction ('til), and is perfectly acceptable. We'll stay here till you get back.

Minuscule -- Spelling hint: When something's minuscule, it's minus (lacking) size.

May/might -- Sometimes they mean the same thing. Often, though, may involves permission and might involves possibility. Jimmy may go to the movies (his mom's allowing him to). Jimmy might go to the movies (he hasn't decided).

Data and media -- These are collective nouns, and should be treated as singular. The data is conclusive. The media has arrived. Bill Walsh of The Washington Post said writers who use them as plurals are educated but misguided, and Patricia O'Conner noted that data seems to have gone the way of agenda, opera, and insignia--technically plural words than have become singular nouns. By the way, as an old IBMer I prefer the pronunciation dayta instead of datta. But that's just me.

Ringer/wringer -- I've recently seen many writers refer to someone under pressure as being "put through a ringer." I think that should be wringer, because I think the expression refers to a squeezing device like the wringers on old-timey washing machines. I think of a ringer as either a lookalike, a secret substitute into a competition, or the guy who pulls the bell rope. Same thing applies to wracking/racking my mind for an answer. I vote for the w.

Toward/towards -- They mean the same thing. Toward is preferred in American English, towards in British English. So I lean toward toward. 

Hung/hanged -- Unless capital punishment is involved, hung is the correct past tense of hang. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be hanged. Where are the grammar cops when you need 'em?

Flammable/inflammable -- They mean exactly the same thing. Both describe something that can easily catch fire and burn quickly.

Invite -- This is a verb that shouldn't be used as a noun. You didn't receive an invite to Jane's party; you received an invitation to Jane's party.

Winch/wench -- A winch is a mechanical device used for pulling/lifting. A wench is an old-fashioned and insulting term for a woman, often in a tavern. I've seen this misused many times in beginners' manuscripts. 

Fellowship and dialogue -- These are among those nouns that should not be used as verbs. We'll fellowship at the church at seven p.m. Should we dialogue about that? No, you shouldn't. By the way, I'm also not wild about using impact as a verb. Our weatherman said we might be impacted by rain today. If it were an asteroid I might agree, but rain? As I've mentioned before, we have a lot of doctors and nurses in our family, and to me, anyone who's impacted is having some serious bathroom issues. (Picture that the next time a news anchor mentions it.)

Accommodate -- Spelling hint: It's big enough to accommodate two c's and two m's.

Ensure/insure -- The way I remember this is, use insure if money or finance is involved. If not, ensure that you use ensure.

Imply/infer -- A speaker implies; a listener infers.

Into/in to -- You get into your car and drive in to your office. If you drive into your office, it's time for new brakes, or new glasses. 

Peaked my interest -- Should be piqued my interest.

For all intensive purposes -- Should be for all intents and purposes.

Give them free reign -- Should be give them free rein. I suspect this misuse is because the word reign involves a king or a ruler.

With baited breath -- Should be with bated breath. Unless you've eaten a can of worms.

T-shirt/tee shirt -- T-shirt is correct. Hint: When it's spread out, it looks like the letter T.

Nauseated/nauseous -- Nauseated means you're sick. Nauseous means you're making me sick. Consider this before telling someone your wife is nauseous.

Momentarily -- It means for a moment. It doesn't mean soon. When he saw Judy, he hesitated momentarily. But if the pilot says, "We'll be in the air momentarily," get off the plane and take a bus.

When choosing whether to use a or an, the pronunciation of the following word--not the spelling--is what matters most. An hour and a half. A European vacation. Please include an SASE.

Convince/persuade -- Convince involves thought; persuade involves action. She convinced him she was right. He persuaded her to drive him home.

All right/alright -- All right is the preferred and accepted usage. Just remember, alright is not all right. 

Ironic -- A tornado during your wedding ceremony might be tragic, but it's not ironic. Getting run over by a Budweiser truck on your way to an AA meeting is ironic.

Fewer/less -- I'm sure you know this already, but fewer involves units, less involves amounts. I have fewer bills and fewer coins in my pocket, so I have less cash in my pocket.

Articles, prepositions, and conjunctions used in the titles of books, movies, etc., are usually capitalized if they contain four or more letters. Wait Until Dark, From Russia With Love, The Night Before Christmas. But I go back and forth on this one, when the preposition is only four words. Sometimes I use Gone With the Wind and sometimes Gone with the Wind.

Between/among -- We all know the rule here--but between can also be used for three or more units when talking about physical relationships. Sand gets between your toes, not among them (even if you have more than two toes).

Everyday/every day -- Everyday is an adjective, period. You don't get out of bed everyday. You get out of bed every day, and put on your everyday shoes.

Blond/Blonde -- I've always agreed with Michael Bracken's submission guidelines on this one: Blond is an adjective, blonde is a noun. The blonde has blond hair. 

Straitjacket and straitlaced -- There's no gh in either one. Strait comes from the Latin strictus, which means constricted or tight. Think Strait of Hormuz.

Ingenious/ingenuous -- Ingenious means brilliant (it has the pronunciation of the word genius built in). Ingenuous means candid or innocently open (ingenue is a word for an inexperienced girl). 

Loath/loathe -- Loath is an adjective meaning unwilling. Loathe is a verb meaning dislike. I am loath to tell you how much I loathe the misuse of these words.

Comprise/compose -- Comprise means to include, and compose means to make up. According to The Elements of Style, a zoo comprises animals, but animals compose a zoo. 

If you're adding ed or ing or er to a verb, double a single final consonant only if the accent is on the final syllable. Canceled, traveled, patrolled, controlled. Words like transferred and kidnapped are exceptions because (I assume) they might otherwise be mispronounced. This is another of those rules that I sometimes obey and sometimes ignore, depending on which way the wind happens to be blowing at the time. I know, for instance, that either traveled or travelled is acceptable.

Some words, like irregardless, utilize, orientate, preplanning, preregister, and preventative, probably shouldn't be used at all. I'm fairly certain anyone who speaks or writes the word utilize just wants to sound more intelligent than he is, because use always means exactly the same thing as utilize, and is four letters and two syllables shorter. And I love this quote from The Elephants of Style regarding the phrase per se: "It means 'in itself.' But beware: Even when used correctly, it identifies the speaker or writer as a geeky, pretentious high-school student." And don't even get me started on OVERuse. I'm sick and tired of overused words and phrases like breaking news, stunning video, due diligence, deep dive, journey, amazing, paradigm, chapter, awesome, synergy, and, yes, impacted.

What are your thoughts on all this? Do you agree with any of them? Disagree? Do they make you either nauseated or nauseous? Can you think of other words/phrases often misused or overused?

I'll close with a wise note from The UPI Stylebook: "A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a writer you are expected to know the difference."

 

 

Fleming. Ian Fleming

Sketch of Bond by Ian Fleming
for the Daily Express

 Bond. James Bond. 

He is one of the most iconic characters in both cinema and English literature. But many speculate who was Bond really? Some say Ian Fleming himself. Some say Sydney Reilly, a legendary operative for SIS in the years between both World Wars. Some have even suggested Christopher Lee, Fleming's cousin and MI6 operative during World War II. The truth is he's a composite with some of Fleming's traits, including a few embarrassing warts, in the mix. As to Fleming's role in British Intelligence, many have suggested he was, in fact, Bond before he created Bond. Others have speculated Fleming actually was M and transferred his crustiness to his fictional Admiral Miles Messervy. That honor actually goes to Fleming's original boss in Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey. In truth, Fleming's role was closer to that of Bill Tanner, Bond's friend and M's chief of staff, much neglected in cinema until the Judi Dench years. 

I recently finished the audio version of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare (No obvious relation.) Shakespeare traces Fleming's lineage from Robert Fleming, a poor Scotsman who traveled to London and became a railroad magnate and, at one point, the richest man in Britain. Ian's father was Val Fleming, a World War I hero who died in action. His brother was noted author Peter Fleming. And like Ian, he also worked in intelligence during the war. Ian himself was a rebellious second child and an aimless young man before he joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent, nearly snagging an interview with Stalin. 

But he also was an unrepentant womanizer. His overbearing mother banished his first love, a Swiss woman named Monique, because she wasn't the right kind of woman. He came close to marrying a fellow operative during the war only for her to be killed in the Blitz. Eventually, he married Anne Charteris, a well-known socialite who had an on-again, off-again affair with Fleming. As illicit lovers, they burned brightly, sharing...Let's call them kinks, and somehow those stayed out of the Bond novels. Probably so they wouldn't get banned. Once married, they were miserable. It was expensive being Anne Charteris-Fleming, and Fleming neither cared for her circle of friends and craved solitude. 

Fleming's "day job," so to speak, was with the Sunday Times. Not only was Fleming a newspaperman at heart, but many former intelligence operatives--like Evelyn Waugh, Roald Dahl, and Len Deighton--all found themselves tapping into their old wartime networks. 

What becomes apparent in Shakespeare's biography is that James Bond is actually an act of mourning. Fleming grieved for the loss of Britain's empire. Bond, with his ties shared with Fleming with American intelligence and knowledge of Soviet tactics and people, was a way to make the UK relevant again. While Bond himself was never an apologist for colonialism, many of Fleming's generation missed it. The feeling even turns up in a Pink Floyd song, "Waiting," from The Wall. ("Would you like to see Britannia rule again, my friend?") Of course, Waters paints it as a farce, but I have two substacks, editing work, and a day job to attend to, so I won't be breaking down Roger Waters's neuroses down here.

A friend of Fleming's told him he might consider his books thrillers, but James Bond had become one of Britain's most enduring and influential characters, along with Falstaff and Sherlock Holmes. The thought horrified Fleming. He might have gotten along with Evelyn Waugh, but he could not stand hanging out with literary types, mainly because Anne forced him to. 

 

REPOST: This Is The Way We Avoid Writing...Avoid Writing...Avoid Writing...

 Dear Sleuthsayers faithful - today was the first day of the new school year (hey, I don't make the rules, or set my district's calendar to this absurdly early date to begin the new school year), and so I'm re-posting a favorite I originally published here back in 2018. Hope you enjoy it, and before you ask, as a matter of fact, NO, I DIDN'T get any writing done today, thankyouverymuch!

*    *    *    *    *

This time it all started with Ezra Meeker. 

The guy it all started with...THIS time.

A pioneer Northwesterner, an Oregon Trail settler who became famous for enriching himself by cornering the world's hop market during the late 19th century, Meeker, was an early and enthusiastic booster of Washington, first as a growing territory, and later as a new state.

I have a project set around the time that Washington became a state (1889) which involves an "Immigrant Inspector" assigned to the Puget Sound area by the INS. As such he has run-ins with illegal immigrants (mostly at this point Chinese), sex slave trafficking rings, drug (mostly opium) smugglers, railroad labor wranglers, railroad labor agitators, and a whole host of others.

With Meeker playing such a prominent role in the early history of the region, I decided that I wanted to dedicate a portion of this on-going project to the South Sound region, and doing research on Meeker and his large extended family seemed like a great starting place for historical evidence that might be used to dress up my germ of a story.

Several rounds of ever-expanding Google searches about Meeker and his extended clan helped lead me to Asa Mercer.

Asa Mercer after he'd left Washington for Wyoming

Poking around in the back yard of the Meekers brought me around to a ton of information on another prominent Washington family: the Mercers, specifically the younger of the original two Mercer brothers, the restless, energetic Asa Mercer.

Now, I write historical mystery. I have a Master's degree in history, and I am a native of the Pacific Northwest, so I've had research-based encounters with both the Meeker and the Mercer families before. This is not new ground for me.

This time, however, I was doing historical research for a fiction-based purpose. So tidbits I might have not bothered pursuing previously, when I was still writing predominantly nonfiction, struck me as worth pursuing, this time around.

This included Asa Mercer's connection with the nascent University of Washington (as a young man he helped build the school's original building, and also served as both its first president, and its first teacher), and his subsequent much more pop-culture friendly association with the so-called "Mercer Girls."

Young Asa Mercer: Check out that pompadour!

For those unfamiliar with the Mercer Girls, here's the short version of the story:

Mercer understood that the majority of settlers in Washington Territory were young, single (and overwhelmingly white) men. Recognizing an opportunity, Mercer headed east to New England, where, during the height of the Civil War, he convinced a significant number of young, unmarried women to travel to the Puget Sound area, luring them with the promise of "honest work" such as teaching jobs, and the greater likelihood of them finding eligible bachelors who could make good husbands.

These intrepid young women all went on to work in the region as schoolteachers. Nearly all of them would later marry, have children, and serve as the human roots of any number of current Northwest family trees.

Nearly a century after their initial arrival in Puget Sound the Mercer Girls went on to serve as the inspiration for a "comic western" television series produced between 1968 and 1970.

I'm talking about Here Come the Brides, of course.

A sappy TV show which has not aged well, Here Come the Brides featured three young actors, two of whom spent considerable time during the '60s and '70s as "teen heart-throbs": Bobby Sherman and David Soul.

These two.

Sherman would go on to a moderately successful career as a pop singer/songwriter, and Soul went on to play Hutch in Starsky & Hutch, then to England, where he was still acting as late as 2014. (UPDATE FOR 2026: both of these guys have since passed on: Sherman in 2025 at age 81, and Soul in 2024, also aged 81.)

And the third guy?

He's Robert Brown.

He's the guy on the right, Those are some sweeeeet gloves.

Here Come the Brides was pretty much the high-water mark of Robert Brown's career, name-recognition-wise. (UPDATE FOR 2026: Mr. Brown has also passed away in 2022, aged 96.) And of course when I came across his picture in the course of digging deeper down into this particular rabbit hole, I recognized him right away.

But not for his work on Here Come the Brides.

Nope.

There's a Star Trek connection.

Yep, I'm a Trekkie.

Nope, not a "Trekker." I don't dress up or go to conventions, or speak Klingon. I just LOVE Star Trek, and have since I was four (the year the original series was canceled).

So of course I recognized Robert Brown from his guest-starring role in the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor." As the time-traveler Lazarus, he played a dual role (same guy, two universes. In one he's sane. In the other, he's not.).

He was great.

And he gets to rock a fake beard that looks waaaay worse than either Ezra Meeker's or Asa Mercer's!

Now, I have a rule when it comes to researching for my writing. If I come across anything remotely relating to Star Trek, the writing of Ross MacDonald, the music of Miles Davis, Stevie Ray Vaughan, or Ryan Adams (this reference has not aged well!), or the poetry of William Butler Yeats, I am required to cease all research, get away from the computer, and go do something which might be remotely productive.

Because given the excuse, I will dig down that particular rabbit hole all the way to China!

So there you have it:

Ezra Meeker. Asa Mercer. Mercer Girls. Here Come The Brides. Robert Brown. Star Trek.

This is the way we avoid writing today.

(But tomorrow is another day!)

See you in two weeks!

Decline & Fall

I mentioned in my last column that I’d been reading Gibbon’s famous history of the Roman Empire, Decline and Fall, which I’d never tackled before.  I’ve never read Herodotus, either, on the Peloponnesian War, or Xenophon’s Anabasis, two other celebrated histories.  I know them only by reputation.  There was a time, of course, when both of them were regularly taught, and in the original.  It was the mark of a classically educated scholar to be conversant in Greek and Latin, and construe his Homer and his Cicero.  

I’m reminded that when my dad got older, and retired across the Massachusetts border into New Hampshire, he took up Trollope.  Trollope was enormously popular in his lifetime, a contemporary and rival of Dickens, but Trollope hasn’t worn as well as Dickens.  You suspect this is because Trollope has a narrower focus, the Barchester books (which my dad was particularly fond of), for example, are about the internal politics of the Anglican church, while Dickens had more of a roving eye, so to speak. 

After my dad died, I myself fell into a binge of Sir Walter Scott.  Quite a few of us might have read Ivanhoe in high school, but not much else, and I discovered that Scott – another guy who was a huge celebrity as a writer, while he was alive – wrote some significantly better books, Old Mortality one of my personal favorites.  St. Ronan’s Well is an attempt to cash in with Jane Austen’s public - the novel of manners not Scott’s strength - and Austen has far outdistanced him in readership mileage.  I remember also wondering aloud about this new-found attachment to a neglected 19^th-century writer, and my friend Ellen Hawkes telling me it seemed entirely natural, that in the wake of my father’s death, I was falling into the past, being  pulled by historical gravity, and revisiting his history by proxy.  (She knew the story about my dad and Trollope.)

I don’t mean to suggest that I’ve gravitated toward Gibbon in my dotage, but there’s some comfort in reading a book so unselfconsciously old-fashioned.  Gibbon’s mannerisms aren’t assumed, they’re entirely natural to the man, and the age he wrote for.  Decline and Fall was published, in six succeeding volumes, between 1776 and 1789.  As it happens, the years of the American and French revolutions, respectively.  Gibbon isn’t a synthesizer, he isn’t summarizing other histories, really, because he’s not that confident he can trust earlier sources.  A lot of the Latin was written to curry favor with whoever was newly risen to power.  Gibbon is weighing the evidence, and he’s not afraid to voice his opinion.  Much of the experience of reading Gibbon has to do with his cadences.  Once you get familiar with the grammar, and the peculiar punctuation, it swings right along.  He doesn’t sound dated, to my ear.

Writers used to insert themselves into the story.  And now, dear Reader is a common trope that we’ve abandoned, as a too-obvious cliché.  You can hark back to it with the first-person narrative, had I but known, but it’s labored, or clunky.  When you see it in a Regency writer, like Austen, though, or one of the Victorians, you don’t cringe.  You see it, almost, as period detail. 

There are conventions, unavoidably, in Gibbon, that bring you up quite sharply, sometimes.  It is a time capsule, two hundred and fifty years old.  But what seems right, to a modern reader, and which must have entertained his contemporaries, are his asides, and sly bits of business.  Here, the assassination of the emperor Caracalla, a capricious incompetent, murdered by his Praetorians.  “He was attended by a body of cavalry; but having stopped on the road for some necessary occasion, his guards preserved a respectful distance, and Martialis approaching his person under a pretence of duty, stabbed him with a dagger.  The bold assassin was instantly killed by a Scythian archer of the Imperial guard.”  In other words, he got a knife between his ribs while he was taking a leak.  The second point being that Martialis was quickly silenced before he could rat out any of the other plotters.  Gibbon doesn’t underline that.  He leaves it to you to fill in the blanks. 

There’s a whisper, in Decline and Fall, of the unreliable narrator.  Gibbon will tell you, the sources contradict each other - but here’s my best guess, and here’s why.  The other thing, is that he often speaks in a conversational tone, as if we already know the story, and he’s confiding extra detail that was left out before.  This has the effect of treating us as colleagues, and of making his history a dialogue, not a lecture.  He invites us to share his table, and does us the compliment of filling the glasses.

My main takeaway from Gibbon, stylistically, is that you can feel your way into a relaxed and amiable speech pattern that mimics common language, even if it’s not entirely natural, but rehearsed - something you might call demotic by design.  I don’t mean that it rings false, but it’s calculated.  Decline and Fall is going to run to a million and a half words, before he’s done, and he needs to find the rhythm.  Somewhere between the unmediated first-person and an omniscient third, Gibbon settles on a kind of public reveal, cautiously artless, as if presenting us with a display of many shiny distractions, some of which may prove to be treasure.  In a word, the book is fun to read. 

The lesson, if we need one, is that a little charm goes a long way.  A lot depends on voice.  Part of it is probably the 18^th- or 19^th-century locutions, and what we might say are anachronisms, but I think the appeal is simple.  Gibbon is approachable.  We should be so lucky.

You Don’t Need to Commit Murder to Have a Fabulous Author Website!

Last fall I realized my website was nearly a year out of date. How did this happen? Well, after many years of using a software program that I found easy to use, my website company had discontinued it, and I'd had to "upgrade." The new program, I was assured, would be simple to use. Ha! It was so not simple (at least for me) that I let my website languish. Eventually, I reached out to a member of my local Sisters in Crime chapter who I'd heard created websites. I told her I needed a system that was intuitive for me so I could easily update my site as needed after she moved everything over to my new host and improved the design. She delivered. That helpful person is Elise Kress, and she's here today to offer her insights to you.

— Barb Goffman 

"Every author should have a website."

 

— Juliet Grames, International bestselling author, Editorial Director at Soho Press

 

  

by Elise Kress

Is your website a sleuth or a victim?

 

The Sleuth:

Your website is out there working hard every day, helping readers find you and discover your books, and showcasing your style.

 

The Victim:

Call the coroner! Your website has been lying suspiciously still for years and needs immediate attention.

 

The good news is: whether your website resembles the meticulous Hercule Poirot or the messy Columbo, you can use these five easy steps to brush it up.

   

1. Buy your given name as a domain name.

Your domain name is your home; your unique address on the web. It’s what you type into the search bar to land on your website and how people search for and find you. (i.e.,  agathachristie.com)

 

If you haven’t yet bought your given name as a domain name, please stop reading and do it right now.

 

Be sure to buy your domain from a well-known and trusted company like GoDaddy or Namecheap. The cost is between $10 - $20 per year.

 

Or, you can buy your domain through your website host/builder. Squarespace, Wix and Showit all allow you to purchase your domain through their platform. You can then link your domain easily to your website on those sites.

 

I recommend that you put your domain name on auto-renew so that when your breakout novel comes out you, won’t lose your domain if it’s renewal time and your mind is on other tasks.

 

.Com is still the most popular suffix, but there are a lot of others. You’ll find this out when you purchase your domain because you’ll get a list of related domains that you can buy. It’s not necessary to own every iteration of your name. Choose one that’s easy to remember, repeat and type. You’ll be typing it a lot, and hopefully others will be too.

 

I do recommend buying any pen names you use; any name that is specifically and directly related to you.

 

Is your name already taken? You can add a descriptive word like colindexterauthor.com or colindexterbooks.com. Also, the .net suffix is widely used.

 

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) allows over 1,000 suffixes. So if you crave a domain name with a suffix of .ninja or .noir, go for it! Just keep in mind that you will be repeating that name over and over again.

 

Should you buy the domain name of your famous recurring character? Perhaps. Domains don’t cost much and that keeps your character’s name out of the hands of scammers who might try to sell it back to you when you’re on the best sellers list.

 

Don’t have a website yet? BUY YOUR GIVEN NAME DOMAIN RIGHT NOW. You can own a domain without having a website. When you launch yours, it’s easy to attach the domain you bought.

Image by rawpixel.com 

Please do not buy your domain from an unknown source. I worked with a client who got her domain through a small web site design company. They set up everything for her. Then when she wanted to move to a different designer, they refused to release her domain for over eight months, while trying to sell her more products. Avoid this by getting your domain through recognized sources. Unfortunately, unscrupulous people abound. That’s good for our stories, but not for our websites!

  

2. Make it easy for visitors to stay in touch

 

You might use a pop-up window, a contact button or a form, maybe all of the above. You need visitors to stay in touch. They are your self-selected audience. Add several ways to sign up for news from you. 

 

When someone gives you their information, they’re telling you they like your work. These are the people who will come to your events, buy your books, and tell their friends. Repetition in this case works well. Don’t be afraid to give people different ways to stay in touch, even on your home page. Maybe they don’t like pop up windows. Maybe they never click on your contact button. Give them various chances to be your supporter.

 

Once people start sending you their email addresses, you’ll need a place to store them and a program to send out news. That’s where an email marketing program comes in. Programs like Mailchimp, Kit (formerly Convertkit) and MailerLite will work with your website to automate mass mailings. Squarespace and Wix now offer integrated email marketing if you have your website on their platform. They may not have every feature that the dedicated programs have, but they’re easy to use and set up.

 

You can use your email list for newsletters, blogs, and announcements. If you happen to have a good-sized list, you’ll be happy, and your agent and publisher will be charmed.

 

Do you have another company that you use for email marketing? Please let me know in the comments!

   

3. Make it easy for visitors to buy your books

Okay. You have your expressive website. It evokes tension and talent. You have a great headline and a killer review. You’ve got a dynamite photo of yourself smiling slyly, holding your latest book with an enticing description. Your visitor is enchanted. They’re ready to buy. But how?

 

Be sure to put a button or link near the top of your home page to take your visitor directly to your preferred bookseller. Do not make them guess or hunt for it.

 

Of course you’re not limited to one bookseller button/link. Somewhere on your site you’ll want to give visitors a selection of retailers that carry your book. Maybe the button/link on your home page takes the visitor to a list of your preferred sellers. You want to make it as easy as possible for the visitor to do what you want--join your email list and buy your book.

 

*Note: Be sure that links to any other websites, such as booksellers, open in new tabs so the viewer can’t close your site without realizing it.

  

4. Make sure your website looks great on a phone

 

If Columbo’d had a cell phone, he’d be texting “one more thing” every minute! The average person spends four hours on their phone every day.

 

What does your site look like on a phone? On a tablet?

 

Take time periodically to check that your website looks just as dazzling on other devices as it does on your desktop. Some website builders allow you to edit your mobile site separately from your desktop view. Given how much we are glued to our phones these days, that’s a big plus. Squarespace, Wix and Showit all allow separate editing functions for your mobile site.

 

Here is a short check list for you when you check your website on a phone:

• Does the site title and main image resize appropriately?
• Is the navigation easy to find?
• Do all the buttons/links work?
• Is it easy to find where to buy your books?
• Do all the pages look good?

Your readers and future readers will thank you.

 

5. Update your website every three months

 

DON’T PANIC! You don’t need to redo your entire website design every three months. Updates can be as simple as a new photo, a new article, a new event or a new blog post. But if your languishing website hasn’t been updated in years, readers will stop checking in. Add something new a few times a year to reassure your readers that you are active and flourishing.

  

One simple thing to keep up-to-date is your website copyright. Update it annually or include the current year in a date range (i.e., © 2022-2026). Nothing says I haven’t been tending my website like a 2011 copyright.

 

BONUS TIP: Refrain from posting the cute photo that your friend took that is just a little bit out of focus. Everything on your website speaks to who you are as an author. Make sure your photos are high resolution that draw the viewer’s eye.

 

Do you have a favorite tip for brushing up your website? I'd love to hear about it in the comments. 

 

Elise Kress is a website designer, specializing in authors’ sites. She plays Celtic music and is working on her first mystery novel. www.ekwebdesign.net

 

As time goes by

I made the mistake of going back to read some of my favorite hard science fiction novels, most of which had been published in the late 20th century.  Brilliant, inventive works as they are, the writers got some of the science wrong.  Not their fault, the updated information had yet to be discovered.  Sadly, some of the undergirding plot lines depended on these false predictions, which caused the books to fall apart faster than a reflecting pool renovation.

The dangers of anachronisms lurk within literature as a whole, though not usually with the dire consequences of forecasting an event that hasn’t yet taken place.  Much of the absurd quibbling over the Odessey movie revolves around controversial moral and social updates, though the basic scaffolding remains intact and easily accessible by our tender 21^st century sensibilities. This is largely true of most of the historical novels I’ve read, mysteries and otherwise, a credit to the authors’ disciplined research.   

(A shout-out here to Jim Benn’s Billy Boyle WWII mysteries, focusing on an era I’ve taken an interest in, which never disappoint, or have me reaching for Wikipedia.)    

When the question arises at writers conferences on how to deal with the assault of advanced technology, in particular the ease with which you can now instantly harvest information about nearly everything without leaving your parents’ basement, some authors breezily say they just set their books before all that happened. 

However, if you chose to start the timeline even a couple decades in the past, you better be on your toes.  You might say, yeah, but I was there!  To which I’d reply, how’s that long term memory working?  Brain scientists will tell you not as good as you think.  Never has the term “trust but verify” been more true.  Nor the value of border collie-like fact checkers of greater value.

One thing’s for sure.  It’s a lot more interesting to follow Phillip Marlowe – as he drives around in his jalopy, intrudes on people’s privacy, drops dimes into payphones and hectors reliable sources in the LAPD or Los Angeles Times – then to describe a lonely guy tapping out commands to Gemini or ChatGPT.

            If there ever was an existential threat to the business of murder mysteries, this is it.  Having your hero hook up with a tech nerd helps – I’ve got one myself – though this has now become such a tired trope, I wish I hadn’t succumbed to the temptation.  On some TV shows, the humans in the operation are reduced to performing the few tasks left to them, such as punching bad guys in the face, or appreciating a nice sunset.  It’s worse when equally clever geeks are on either side of the good vs. evil divide, trying to out-tech each other.  Why not just have Hera and Athena duke it out with lightning bolts, like they did in the old days?  At least the pretense of human agency is not an issue. 

Science fiction, ever resilient despite the risks, has some solutions.  In one book, alien bacteria have eaten all the insulation around electronic conductors, collapsing the whole edifice.  In another, there’s a super cyberintellience, but it turns out it likes to lie, just for fun.  Alien lifeforms are often good for mixing it up, especially when the author has the sense to grace the other worlders with entirely different sets of urges and motivations.   

Chaos Theory (interestingly named, since it actually delineates order within seemingly chaotic dynamic systems) features the state of phase transition, such as the frenzied condition of liquid H2O right before it turns into steam.  We’re living in such a thing ourselves, caught between past experience and the hurtling uncertainties of the future.

             A friend of mine, a retired stockbroker, has a healthy catalog of aphorisms that helped guide his career.  One of my favorites is, “People have a tendency to extrapolate current circumstances indefinitely into the future.”  Science would agree this is entirely fallacious, since the only constant in the universe is that everything has a cycle, that current circumstances will always change, you just don’t know exactly how.  There is no Steady State, even though Einstein once tried to prove there was, an effort he later abandoned, somewhat sheepishly. 

Perhaps the most reliable constant informing literature is that people are infinitely complex, and that love, vulnerability and death play havoc with every being’s emotional and intellectual composition.  The human factors may vary with the sociology of the era, but the fundamental things apply.

Maybe not forever, but for now, that’s good enough. 

On-The-Nose Dialogue

One of the most iconic lines of dialogue in movies is from Jaws, 1975.

"You're gonna need a bigger boat."

Sheriff Brody's retort reveals his sense of humour in the face of terror, and his understatement as to the size of their adversary. Brody isn't literally suggesting they head back to shore and procure a larger vessel.

"That's a big shark. We're going to have a lot of trouble catching that."

Had Brody said this line of on-the-nose dialogue instead, the scene would have had no spark, nothing about his character would have been revealed, and people certainly wouldn't be quoting it half a century later.

Why is that line on-the nose?

Because it's too literal, too explicit. It's so direct and free of ambiguity or subtext, stating exactly what the character is thinking, that the character may as well be a robot.

Etymology: The expression "on-the-nose" originated at the track in the early 20^th century. Bettors would wager “on the nose,” meaning on a horse to win outright, not place or show. This usage meant directly, exactly, no hedging.

Dialogue is the fuel that runs a story. It moves the story forward, reveals character, delivers information, and gives a story its identity. Think of movies like All About Eve, written by Joseph Mankiewicz, or Pulp Fiction, written by Quentin Tarantino, or books like The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, written by Raymond Chandler. The dialogue in these works has a certain flavour and sparkle that is distinctive and memorable – goals for any writer.

At the other end of the scale is on-the-nose dialogue. It has no sparkle or uniqueness. It states literally what a character thinks, feels, or intends, with zero subtext, tension, or ambiguity. It's the weakest form of dialogue because there is nothing for the reader to infer or learn about the character saying it.

On-the-nose dialogue:

Tells instead of shows	"I'm angry."
Names emotions instead of dramatising them	“I’m so happy you are my friend”
Explains motives instead of revealing them	“I don’t love him anymore.”
Removes tension by stating the truth directly	“I did not hit her. I did not!”
Feels like the writer speaking, not the character	"This is about building trust."

The failure of on-the-nose dialogue is its lack of dramatic subtlety. It's artificial. People don't talk like that in real life. And when they do in movies or books, they are merely "devices" for the author to convey information or exposition, not three-dimensional characters with which we want to invest our time and interest.

Real people almost never articulate their emotions, especially when they’re hurt or under pressure. They dodge, joke, stall, contradict themselves, or circle the truth without touching it. So, when a character says, “I’m angry because you betrayed me,” the line may be factually correct, but it lands flat. The audience already feels the anger from the situation; saying it out loud drains the moment of tension and robs the scene of its dramatic charge.

Three ways you can avoid on-the-nose dialogue:

• Subtext
• Behaviour instead of explanation
• Misdirection

Subtext is the invisible layer beneath what's said and what's meant. It's the emotional or psychological truth that characters don’t say outright. Write about what the character wants in the moment, not what they feel. A character who wants reassurance might say, “Are you coming home tonight?” instead of “I’m afraid you’re pulling away from me.” The first line carries need, insecurity, and tension in its unspoken subtext. It lets the audience do the interpretive work.

Behaviour instead of explanation. Let your characters reveal emotion through actions like hesitation, interruption, sarcasm, and silence, rather than expressing that emotion directly. A snarky "Whatever" can communicate someone's hurt more effectively than a paragraph about feeling dismissed. Two characters arguing about what movie to go and see may actually be arguing about trust or resentment.

Misdirection. Let your characters talk about something trivial and mundane when something important is at stake. This creates tension and realism. Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction (Royale with cheese) where hitmen Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield are driving to confront a group of young men in an apartment? They don't talk about the violence they're going to unleash; they talk about hash smoking, hamburgers, and putting mayonnaise on French fries. This is just another day at the office for these two. Killing people is no big deal.

On-the-nose dialogue is fine in the first draft. The writer is still discovering the emotional architecture of the scene, and once the structure is understood, the writer can return to the dialogue and replace literal statements with gestures, contradictions, or lines that reveal character through voice rather than exposition. Remember the golden rule: The key to writing is rewriting.

The real key to avoiding on‑the‑nose dialogue is trusting the reader. Drama lives in the space between what’s spoken and what’s actually meant. Give your dialogue moments of silence, suggestion, and ambiguity. That space – the part the reader fills in themselves – is where your story comes alive.

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