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"Write about what you know," we’ve all heard it in writing classes, from teachers, and even a few other writers. I believe that one saying has done more harm to generations of beginning writers, and most people put the thought at the feet of Earnest Hemingway.He was a big game hunter, a sport fisherman, a revolutionary, and other very macho things, including a womanizer, but that was a pretty much a sport of his male generation. He did, at least, live what he preached. He has been used in writing class from high school to college to give this message, "Write what you know." I call bullshit on that. I thought it was questionable as far back as junior high, but the farther I went in my own pursuit of a writing career the more I knew it wasn’t true for me, or for the writers I was meeting. Most of my writing friends wrote science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery, so if we’d taken Hemingway’s advice to heart we couldn’t have written any of it. To take that advice to heart as much as some writing teachers seemed to wish we’d need to be at least astronauts to write science fiction, or maybe aliens. To write fantasy we’d need to be Tolkeinesque wizards or sword wielding warriors and know a dragon or two. For horror we’d need to have real ghosts floating through our houses, or a real monster in it’s hiding place in the basement, or have that neighbor that piled up bodies in his spare time, or maybe be a vampire ourselves. For mystery we’d need to be murderers, or have dealt with real dead bodies in some way. Now there are real police, ex and otherwise, that write mysteries. There are even mystery writers that have had early experiences with violent death for real, and go on to exorcise their demons on paper, but for the vast majority of mystery writers that I know they’ve never seen a body outside of a funeral home. Tragic, but not the stuff of mystery novels.

Maybe this tired advice, "Write what you know," is the reason that so many of you fans think I live in an Addams’s family style mansion, dress in Goth-wear in my day to day life, and have that bevy of male sex slaves. I have close friends that are still asked all the above when people find out that they know me. Some are quite disappointed when the answer to all the above is, no.

Let me put the advice that I’ve found works much better for most writers, "Write about what you want to know about." When I set about writing the first Anita novel I had only shot two guns in my entire life, and none of them were the guns I would eventually end up giving Anita to carry. Research is the key. You can research damn near anything. Start with books and magazines on the subject, as I did with guns, then try to find a reasonable expert to talk to about the subject. I tend to pick subjects that are mostly male dominated like guns and police work and that does make it harder to find someone that will talk to me and not treat me like a girl, though sometimes I run into the opposite problem with my success and they expect me to be Anita for them. They expect me to have her weapons skills. I can shoot, but I do not have the familiarity of someone who carries a gun for their job and their safety on a daily basis, that is a whole different kind of weapons ability. Two reasons then to do book research first; so you don’t waste your time, or your expert’s time, and second, so you seem less like an idiot when talking to them. Wasting time by asking beginning questions that could easily be answered from books makes your expert realize you really have done no preliminary work and are expecting them, the expert, do all your work for you. Sloppy and not very professional, not good. Always strive for professionalism, and curtesy when dealing with people who are giving you their time and knowledge. Also remember that you are only as good as your professional help, by that I mean make certain your expert is really an expert in the area you are researching. I have had a few "experts" pretend to greater expertise than they actually had, and I was so new in the area that I couldn’t tell the difference. But if you are lucky enough to find an expert in an area, treat them like gold.

A confession, I am often a little uncomfortable taking up the time of experts, especially those that do real police work or real life saving expertise. I only write about life and death and often feel embarrassed about taking up the time of those men and women who actually do it for real. I don’t know if I will ever get over the feeling that my job is not quite as real a job as theirs. Yes, I’ve hit number one of the New York Times list, and yes I now routinely hit the list, and am a best seller. I have by any rule in my career been very successful, but in the end I sit in a room and make up things, then write them down, when talking to someone who risks their life everyday to keep the rest of us safe, I feel almost apologetic. They don’t make me feel that way, they are always lovely, it’s just my issue. But embarrassed, or not, I find my experts and try to get my real life details as accurate as possible. My other rule is when you are asking people to believe in vampires, zombies, and fairies, you must make certain that real world details are as accurate as possible, because if a reader can catch you wrong in the real world they won’t believe your monsters. And believe me, there is someone out there that is an expert on everything, and they will let you know if you get it wrong. If you’ve done your research and choose to fictionalize it, that’s one thing, but writing it wrong because you simply don’t know better is one of the sins of fiction in my book.