Blog - Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Mustn’t let adults know

I used to run The Banned Book Club for teenagers. We only read books that had been banned by libraries [...]

I wrote Copy Boy, my first of the Jane Benjamin novels, in ten years, dipping in and out of the [...]

It's like I'm a sophomore. It's fascinating to me how a person can turn sixty and still feel, well, sophomoric. To [...]

In just three days, January 10, the Mystery Review Crew website will launch, sharing news, reviews, interviews, videos and more [...]

Sacramento-born author, Joan Didion, who passed away over the holidays, had an outsized effect on me, especially this idea from [...]

With Stories on Stage Sacramento co-director Dorothy Rice, I spent a December Sunday in the Crocker Museum's Friedman Court, facilitating [...]

I just subscribed to the Renee Patrick Books newsletter, drawn in by their Golden Age of Hollywood series, featuring legendary [...]

Proofreading's a metaphor for life. I know. You're rolling your eyes. But wait. I've been proofing Tomboy before advance reader [...]

My writing group, the RBGs, got me through the pandemic. (The 2021 chapter of it anyway.) I don't know what [...]

On LitHub's Authors in the Tent, Ona Russell recently interviewed true crime writer, Caitlin Rother. Rother's written 14 books. As a [...]

I love my local bookstore, Capital Books, partly because they just like to have fun with books. To that end, [...]

Poet Barbara Hamby's "I Beseech Thee, O Yellow Pages" scratches an itch today. Thanks to my friend, author Amanda McTigue, [...]