I could not wait to finish the second Skeet Bannion mystery by Linda Rodriguez. I recommend it highly for its entertainment value as well as explication of a Cherokee hero. I couldn't put it down.
Rodriguez is a fine poet and prose writer, and she shares her secrets on her blog,
Also recommended is her guest post on the Guelph Writers Now blog, about how to use lists to keep plot, characters, and setting straight. Sounds simple, but it isn't! She writes,
"I wrote personality and appearance sketches for each character, but in addition, I made a list of each character as s/he appeared with a few words to note key characteristics. I did the same for places in my made-up town. This meant I could look up the full name of walk-on characters easily when I needed to much later in the book. It meant that I could easily look up the important details of the buildings on the campus and the shops on the town square as my protagonist, Skeet Bannion, walked past them or into them."
See all of this good craft essay: http://guelphwritenow.com/2013/06/05/using-lists-in-writing-a-novel/
