As I have been doing for decades, I attended the Writers' League of Texas annual Agents & Editors Conference. If you're a writer who is eager to learn more about the craft and business of the publishing industry, this conference is one of the best thanks to its top-tier agents, editors, and authors who give talks, participate in panel discussions, and listen to book pitches.  This year, I

I’m writing a bit for A&E TV’s Real Crime blog. For those who love true crime or even those who write fiction and need to know what it’s like to interview a murderer, I thought my first A&E article might interest you. In it, true crime authors Ron Franscell, Caitlin Rother, and I share our tips for interviewing killers. Click on the photo for the link to the article.   When It’s Y

Around 11 AM on June 26, 2001, six days and one hour after Andrea Yates summoned Houston police to her suburban, middle-class house and confessed that she’d drowned her children, St. Martin’s Press contracted me to write a book about the case. Simultaneously, Judge Belinda Hill of the 230th District Court in Harris County, Texas, the presiding judge on the case, placed a gag order on all involved, including cops, inv

I was preparing to leave my house for a Bastille Day party, when the news broke that tens of people had died and hundreds had been injured in a presumed terrorist attack in Nice, France–another damned attack. As I drove to the party, I constantly tuned my radio to CNN to MSNBC to NPR to the BBC and more, trying to learn the details. I was so obsessed with the news that when I walked into the party, I was shocke

As many of you know, I wrote Secret Sex Lives: A Year on the Fringes of American Sexuality because I needed to laugh. I’m needing to laugh again because I’ve been spending too much time thinking about Andrea Yates. June 20, 2016, marks 15 years since Yates drowned her five children, because her mind was twisted with psychosis. It’s a case I wrote about in my book Breaking Point and have been spending perhaps too much

This has been a positive day. As some of you know, I’ve been depressed for months. Part of that depression has been the natural grieving process after my friend’s death. But my depression grew darker and scarier over the past five months, coinciding with the revelation of the sexual assault crimes and attempted cover ups at my alma mater, Baylor University. In fact, last March I started writing a post abo

As a writer, one might think it a bit strange that I headline a post “Action v. Words,” especially since I’m about to gripe about words. But it’s exactly because I am a writer that I know the importance of action versus words. Here’s a simple example: If I talk all the time about writing a book and never take the action to actually write the book, I fail as a writer. Here’s another

Forty years and almost two months after I was graduated from Baylor University, I stood outside the wrought iron gates of its president’s home. I’m talking about Ken Starr’s home. He’s the president of Baylor. The same Ken Starr who investigated President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and on the Paula Jones sexual harassment charges. So I find it painfully ironic that it’s a series of rape scandals

When I last blogged in February 2015, I thought I was back to posting on a regular basis. But then … career and life happened. In some ways, saying career happened seems contradictory because in the world of book publishing we’re asked to blog. In fact, many literary agents tell us that the number of blog hits we get—as well as the number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans we have—influences publishers to buy or