by Piper Bayard Sshh! I have a secret. I’ve never said it out loud, but I’m going to share it with you – because you need to know. I’m an author with two books out. Both books made the top ten of one bestseller list or another. I also post at over 60 websites nationwide […]

Piper Bayard Conference season is gearing up for the year – a time of excitement, anticipation, and, for many writers, social angst. But with a few tips and a little preparation, it can also be a time of fun and founding lifelong friendships. Most of us are introverts. Just thinking about mingling in a room […]

 Piper Bayard A character arc in fiction, as in life, is the path by which a character transcends his deepest fear to achieve greatness. Without this evolution, the reader has no reason to travel with that character through the story.     To create this character arc, we must know our character’s greatest fear. According […]

Piper Bayard of Bayard & Holmes No one wants to read about a fictional nice day. Great fiction is about one thing, and one thing only . . . problems. And lots of them. Problems keep the pages turning, and the heart of a problem is conflict. Without conflict, there is no plot, which is […]

Bayard & Holmes ~ Jay Holmes In our last Writing Spies article, we talked about bugging rooms.* But what if our characters need to know if a room is already bugged?  First, consider the character being bugged and the character or organization doing the bugging. Some characters are going to expect surveillance. For example, Mafiosos […]