In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
The May/June issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine was distributed to all the attendees at this past weekend’s Malice Domestic conference—with several contributors to the issue in attendance, including Leslie Budewitz, Shelly Dickson Carr, Deborah Lacy, Tara Laskowski, and Marianne Wilski Strong, and one contributor sadly not in attendance: Bonnie Stevens herself, whose story “One-Day Pass” appears posthumously here.
A couple of these writers will be offering First Two Pages essays on their stories, beginning with Deb Lacy, whose story “Taking Care” marks her AHMM debut—hopefully with many more stories in future issues ahead!
Deborah has written stories for other magazines and anthologies, including Mystery Weekly, the Anthony-award winning Bouchercon anthology Blood on the Bayou, Dark Corners, and Shh…Murder, the latter co-written with Pat Hernas. Deb also runs one of the best blogs in the business— Mystery Playground—and she contributes as well to Macmillan publishing’s Criminal Element blog.
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay here to read off-line.
Deborah Lacy
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Thanks for being part of the series here! Looking forward to reading the full story soon—still recovering from Malice! 🙂