by Piper Bayard of Bayard & Holmes

Many genres involve characters who at some point experience fear, and it is common for them to want to hide in their homes. Everything from creepy shadows, to hang up calls, to ominous social media posts or threats by mobsters can have our characters holing up. … Read the post

by Piper Bayard

One of the most common elements of fiction writing is some type of faction vs. faction conflict, whether we are writing about a change of regime in a local PTA, a kingdom, a modern republic, or interstellar empires.… Read the post

by Piper Bayard of Bayard & Holmes

Before our characters in the Intelligence Community can save the world, they have to be recruited. While we can accomplish this any number of ways in fiction, reality is a bit more limited.

Every year in January, we love digging into the stats and sharing the posts that got the most views and shares the prior year. Often these posts surprise us, and always they delight us.

Here are the "Dynamic Dozen" for 2022

Every single one of these articles wowed us, and it was interesting to see how many were from a long time ago.… Read the post

By Piper Bayard
of Bayard & Holmes

Authors who write about crime need to understand crime. My writing partner, Jay Holmes, is a 45+ year veteran of field intelligence operations, and we often get questions about espionage and crime. In our last article, Writing Believable Driveway Crime: Carjacking & Kidnapping, we wrote about crime that commonly occurs in driveways.… Read the post