Celeste Bennett's Blog

After reading Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly, I decided to do some light mystery reading with a Stephanie Plum book. She's zany and unpredictable in a predictable way. Once I'm done with "Hardcore Twenty-Four," I'll move on to Johnathan Kellerman's Mystery. Switching from light to dark keeps me from getting too morose.

Wow! I can't believe how much better I feel after having my heart burned. That's right, parts of my heart were burned so the tissues would scar up and prevent the signal for extra beats from activating. It was five hours on the operating table and up to three months of healing, but I'm glad to be back and finishing up my fourth Yarn Genie Mystery novel, "Wedding Lace Murder," due out in June.

I'm having so much fun writing the book; I wish I'd had "heart burn" sooner.

I launched "Hooked Into Murder" this past Saturday at the Women Who Write Author Showcase in Grand Rapids. Not only did I make connections with readers and business services for women authors, but I also got to share ideas and information with 11 other writers. I can tell you these ladies were an inspiration for me. I love how each one wrote because they wanted to make a positive impact on the world around them. And, of course, I overspent my book budget. :)

Forgotten
1/15/2016 0 Comments

I took a long break from my writing over the holidays, perhaps too long. When I got back to my rewrites, I was surprised to learn that Imogene, the yarn genie, had visited a private detective to find out the truth of what happened to her father.

I had totally forgotten that I'd added another character to Hooked Into Murder, the second Yarn Genie Mystery. When I restarted my edits this week, there he was. How could I have forgotten Melton Chilton, of Chilton Detective Agency? He is such a strange guy, but one I like. I have a feeling he's going to stick around--he needs the work.

Journaling is a way to help those who go on after us to understand us and the decisions we made that impacted on future generations. I have very little written history from my ancestors, people I love but have never met. I don't know details about the potato famine that caused my mother's great-grandfather to leave Ireland or why my great-grandparents took in my father's father and raised him.
Keeping a personal journal or writing a memoir is a way of showing our posterity, people we may never know in this lifetime, that we love them enough to provide them with our personal message.

The 28th Year of Lansing, Michigan's A Rally of Writers is tomorrow, April 18, 2015 at the West Campus Conference Center for Lansing Community College. The keynote speaker is Jack Lessenberry, Michigan Public Radio political commentary and essayist.

You can download the brochure at www.arallyofwriters.com. Online Early REGISTRATION is now CLOSED, but there is still a CHANCE of registering at the door for $100.

The trend these days is to de-clutter. We get rid of the excess in our offices, our homes, our cars, our yards, and garages. De-cluttering can only go so far in writing before you've lost the impact. I once overheard an MSU professor telling her students to get the 'it' out of their creative writing. That tiny two-letter word is not better than the longer words you could be using.


Try doing a word search of your manuscript for the word "it" and replace it with the wordier version. Does the new version read better? This seems to improve most writing--with the exception of "A Tail of Two Cities."

The Kindle sale for "Knitting Up a Murder" ends in 18 hours.

Knitting Up a Murder for Kindle is on sale for $1.99 through April 7th.

The 99 cent Kindle Sale for "Knitting Up a Murder" goes through today, April 2. Tomorrow the sale goes to $1.99.