As a thriller writer, I get to make up stories and create characters. I tend to put those characters in terrible situations and give them seemingly impossible mysteries to solve, but it’s all in the name of entertaining people.

Much of this happens in my head. Then I sit down to write the first draft.

And, for me, that tends to be the laborious part of writing a novel. I power through it, writing words, sentences, and paragraphs that I know will be deleted later. Writer Rick hates that.

But Editor Rick loves it.

By A.J. McCarthy

I attended my first writer’s conference recently, and I came home with one big regret. Why didn’t I do this sooner?

It wasn’t my intention to attend, having used up my travel budget to go to two book festivals in California in April, but an extraordinary event prompted an extraordinary trip.

I regularly enter writing contests, and sometime last spring, I came across the Killer Nashville Claymore Award competition for an unpublished manuscript. I dusted off an old one and submitted it, never imagining anything would come of it but, what the heck, I’m allowed to be optimistic.