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I'm a big fan of, the online comic by Scott Meyer. I'm a subscriber (you should be, too) and I have a dozen or so of his comics hanging up in my office. This one should be shared with every person you know who's writing a mystery. Ìý

Many people love the popular little primer, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to PunctuationÌýby Lynne Truss. I am not one of them. It was all about following the rules of grammar, and that right there should be enough to know why I tossed out my copy.ÌýI did not care for Mr. Lynne's snooty, 'I'm so smart,' tone, the 'let’s kill those who use bad grammar' attempts at humor or the dire, 'English is doomed,' predictions. No, sir, I did not like it one bit.

Turns out, I’m not alone.

Here's a tip that I learned from the late great , master of the short mystery story.Ìý

Although we both lived in Rochester, the first time we met was at the Edgar Awards ceremony. I was up for best-first (It's an honor just to have been nominated) and Ed was receiving a well-earned, much-deserved Lifetime AchievementÌýAward. We were talking over cocktails (me asking lots of questions, him giving brilliant advice to every one) when he said that he never had a problem getting started every day because of how he left off the night before: 'Never write to the end of a chapter, the end of a paragraph, the end of a sentence or even to the end of the word.'

Brilliant.

Returning readers of this blog may recall that before I start a new book. I've got , so it's time to start finding the right voice. That's where things get tricky.

So the other night I went to seeÌý and at . It was a great show, as expected, but one thing I didn't expect was to be so impressed with the first act on the bill, Dan Potthast of . All alone on the stage, he delivered a rousing set that set the tone for the whole night. (.) I chatted with him after the show and bought 3 of his CDs including one MP3 CD that has--no kidding--99 songs on it. Most are under 3 minutes and a few are under 50 seconds (though there is one that's 13 minutes long), but they're real songs with a full band, many including horns.

Ìý

You’re a writer.1 You know what you want to say, how you want to say it and why it needs to be said at all. You can write your book just the way you want to write it and have it published as an e-book or through a print-on-demand house without any editorial assistance. You don’t need an editor.

But you need an editor.

Last week I spent a day at Hornell High School in Hornell, New York. Great students, cool teachers, a wonderful librarian - good times. It was while I was there that I was asked one of the best questions anyone has ever asked me about my YA books.

Strike that - about any of my books.

During lunch with the AP Psychology class, one of the students asked if I thought my books would have the same impact if I had somehow worked in a traditional happy ending. That may not be the word-for-word question, but you get the drift. And this isn't the word-for-word answer I gave, but I'll try to get it in the ballpark.

So I'm in the middle (in the first-quarter, actually) of revising my new manuscript, tentatively entitled THE CALLER. My editor at HarperCollins sent me the manuscript back about a month ago with some notes on how to tighten up the story and flesh-out the characters.

I like that - "some notes."

The truth is that there are a lot of notes, and at first it scared the hell out of me. A very OMG moment, except there were a lot of OS's and OF's in there as well. But then I read her notes and they were all coming back to the same 3 or 4 main points. Less OMG and more 'Oh, I Ìýcan do this.' That seems to be my pattern: panic first, then look at it realistically, planning the best way to get the job done. But definitelyÌýpanic first.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to panic first. Imagine how it'd feel to look at a problem realistically and THEN have to panic. Yeah, I like my way better. Ìý

Here's a question for all you no-longer-teens out there (The new 'tweens! Between 20 and death!): If you could write a letter to your teen self, what would you say? That's the idea behind DEAR TEEN ME: AUTHORS WRITE LETTERS TO THEIR TEEN SELVES, edited by Kirsten Anderson and Miranda Kenneally, coming soon to a bookstore near you. Would you warn yourself about some really bad decisions you'd soon be making, help yourself through a tough spot with the wisdom that only comes with time, or would you give yourself the courage to go ahead and get that facial tattoo? I know what I'd write 'cuz I did. I'm honored to be among the many great authors in this new anthology, so of course I'm going to ask you to rush off and buy it, right now. To make it even easier than buying a book already is, send a letter to your teen self, encouraging yourself to become the president of Zest Books, the publisher of DEAR TEEN ME.

I swear, the next book I write is either going to be set in the distant past or in the far, far future--any time period when I don't have to worry about the technology changing as I'm writing the book. The technology of Ancient Rome is pretty set in stone, and as for the distant future, I can just make stuff up. But right now? Every time I type a scene that involves an iPhone or the Internet or a computer I risk having the next version of the device make my book look horribly out of date.

Case in point: The Cloud.Ìý

I had this nice little plot thingy going in which a character loses everything when a computer goes down, only to be told by my more tech-savvy friends that most computers back-up on the Cloud now, so he really wouldn't lose a thing. I found a way around it, but who knows how long that will last before someone invents an app that solves that problem, too?