TO CATCH A THIEF: ART FRAUD DETECTIVES FIGHTING CRIME by Yvonne Saxon

Art fraud has been around for centuries. It’s known that the Romans copied statues and passed them off as Greek. So many Old Masters (think Da Vinci, Raphael, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, for starters) have been copied, that there’s an Old Master forgery ring whose extent even the biggest auction houses and the top art specialists don’t know. It's not just paintings that are being counterfeited, either. Artifacts, statues, books, prints, etc., are all being stolen, copied, faked, and fabricated. For example, art dealer Tatiana Khan, owner of  Los Angeles' Chateau Allegre gallery, was paid $1,000 to copy Picasso's "La Femme Au Chapeau Bleu." She then sold the copy for $2 million to a buyer. “Fake art is the third largest criminal activity on Earth after drugs and weapons” according to a source.

LEARNING FROM THE BEST WRITERS by Maria Hudgins

 There must be a thousand books on "How to Write." If you read them all you wouldn't have time to write.So what are a few really good ones? How do you know if a book on writing is good? How do you know this author's advice is right or wrong? That's easy. Read a bit of it and if you are having a hard time putting it down--the author knows what he's doing. This topic, after all, is dry as dirt. It's right up there with "How to change the duvet cover," or "How to clean a bathroom," or "Filling out your 1040 form."

The best book on writing I have ever read is Stephen King's "On Writing" which, by now, has probably gone through a dozen editions. I couldn't put it down. I've read it more than once and not because I didn't remember his advice. It's wonderfully entertaining. I can't forget his description of pretending to be a circus strong man when he was two years old.

I've been looking at a website called Master Class and I see a lot of today's top writers are contributing their best suggestions.One click gives you samples of their advice and I have clicked on a bunch of them. I would tend to favor the words of authors that are my personal favorites. If I enjoy them, I think, so would others. My taste in stories is not unusual. I'm pretty typical. It's not free, but at $120/year, it's cheap for what you can get if you really use it.

This may sound stupid, but I learn a lot from listening to a favorite author on audio. It doesn't matter if the author is doing the reading or not. Some writers are not good readers, and some are. Listening frees your mind to think only about the story. When you aren't thinking about the words on the page or how many pages are left in this chapter, you become more aware of the structure. Why is the writer giving you all these details in one chapter but not in another one? Where is the viewpoint character and what are his eyes seeing? If she parks her car, does she immediately open the door? Does she remember to pick up her purse? Why does the writer skip over all the details sometimes with a brief, "Next morning, he flew to Chicago?" Details are tedious if they don't move the story forward.

Sometimes I can just lie in bed with my eyes closed and realize that I'm working!

WHAT WE'RE READING THIS SUMMER! by the Sand In Our Shorts Gang

It’s July, it’s hot, (in the northern hemisphere at least) and it’s time to grab a good book to read at the beach, the lake, the pool, or in the front porch swing! The Sand-in-our-Shorts writers are here sharing their summer reads with you. Their picks might be your next vacation read— check it out!

Michael Rigg:

I’m not much of a beach reader. Sun and sand and sweat don’t create an inviting atmosphere for reading. (And sunscreen makes the pages stick together.)  But sitting at a beach house in Sandbridge pouring over a novel, with the roar of the ocean as background? Well, that’s a horse of a different color. Especially if there’s air conditioning involved. Next on my summer

VACATION FUN: BEAUTY, HISTORY, AND MYSTERY! By Angela G. Slevin

The throne room

      Summer always puts me in mind of vacations and travel. This year, I’m thinking of two places, one I’ve been to many times and where I have family, and the other a place I’ve always wanted to go. Surprisingly to me, they have a connection.

     The island of Crete, Greece, sits in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and is huge in comparison to the other Greek isles. Crete measures 160 miles wide from west to east, and varies in width from 7.5 to 37 miles from north to south, making its area 3,218 square miles. Crete was an independent nation from 1898 until 1913, when it joined modern Greece.

RESEARCH: A CRITICAL PART OF WRITING. BUT NO ONE SAYS IT HAS TO BE BORING! By Michael Rigg

Harriet Robin 
New Orleans School of Cooking 

Any fiction writer worth their salt will acknowledge that research is a key component of our craft. We write stories that, in the long run, are not entirely true. That’s why it’s called fiction. We ask our readers to suspend belief, at least while they read what we write, and pray they will accept our premise: “what if…” But to engage the reader, to keep them turning pages, our fiction must be plausible.

In sum, fiction—the ultimate untruth—must, of necessity, be based in truth, and supported by facts. Our written untruth must be believable. Thorough research is how we attain this believable untruth. Research is the lifeblood of good fiction. If it doesn’t ring true, the reader will soon be bored and more likely to put our novel down and, worse, add us to their “do not read” list.