Carol Gyzander

I recently found a little book made of folded paper, titled “A Book About Dogs” that I made when I was five. However, it wasn’t until about twenty years ago that the idea really came back home. I was listening to mystery/thriller writer Harlan Coben, who lived in my hometown, address a luncheon gathering about plotting a novel. I thought, “Yeah, I want to do that.” Of course, I had two little kids at the time and it took a while for me to get it rolling.

My early loves were three “A” authors: Agatha, Andre (Norton) and Asimov. These days I still love reading mystery and science fiction, and now I love horror as well: Lee Murray is awesome, as well as Jeff Strand and Tim Waggoner.

I wrote my first novel during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It’s a volunteer group that encourages folks to write 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November (that’s a bit more than half). The structure was quite helpful to me, and the thing that really helped cement it was the small in-person writing group I joined at a local coffee shop, run by my pal Brian Lynch. We all met every Tuesday to sit together and write, and this was what got me to finish the novel over the next year!

My first pass through a story is often fairly bare-bones, and made up of basic actions and dialogue; then I go back and layer in more description, actions that reveal the character’s inner thoughts, etc. So, when I’m writing, I always try to picture whether I am creating dialogue realistically. Would someone really talk like that?

A clearer understanding of point-of-view and how/when to choose which way to tell the story would have been a true gift! I spent a long time deliberating about that on my first amateur detective novel, and wound up rewriting it from first person to close third person. I knew enough to think about it, at least, but not enough to make the right (write?) decision!

One of the greatest things that has helped my writing has been my experience as an editor. I’ve been participating with Writerpunk Press, which produces charity anthologies of punk genre stories (cyberpunk, steampunk, biopunk, etc.) inspired by classic tales such as Shakespeare, Poe, and classic horror. I’ve been Editor-in-Chief for the last four anthologies, and working with both the volunteer editors and the writers helped me gain great insight into the process of what makes a good story. And, we support an animal shelter called PAWS in Lynwood, WA while also making fabulous books!