BRIAN’S FOOT
Or “Two Hours in the Life of a Writer”
by Betty Webb
This blog was supposed to be titled “A Day in the Life of a Writer,” but due to time-management concerns, it is now sub-titled (in case you haven’t noticed) “Two Hours in the Life of a Writer.”
This morning, after feeding the cats, showering, and eating a breakfast of Walmart’s Mini Shredded Wheat floating in soy milk, and washed down by an entire pot of Trader Joe’s Dark Roast, I head for the messy room I call the Den.
At 5:45 a.m., all a-tremble from that caffeine, I fire up my computer and call up the second draft of The Critters from Planet Zero (working title). Yesterday, I’d left Rita, the book’s heroine, trapped in a large box that she could have escaped from if she’d wanted to, but for some reason, didn’t. My task this morning was to figure out why Rita is content to remain in the box, the prisoner of Brian, a man who obviously doesn’t have all his marbles.
As I’d earlier set Brian up, he doesn’t have a streak of violence in his rather messy body (his morning grooming rituals are slapdash), but he believes that forming a dancing team with his prisoner (Rita) will bring him fame and fortune. The fact he doesn’t know how to dance hasn’t yet occurred to him.
At 5:54 I type, “As Brian lugged the large box carrying Rita into the motel, his left foot…”
My writing is cut short by a series of blood-curdling screams from my kitchen. Horrified, I leave Brian’s foot in the air and rush into the kitchen, where I find two of my four indoor cats (the calico and the Persian) brawling over a plastic mouse. After separating them—and receiving several scratches while doing so -- I stash the plastic mouse in a drawer, and return to my computer, where Brian is mid-step in the process of carrying the boxed-up Rita into the motel. But where is the motel? What does it look like? Smell like? Come to think of it, what about Brian? What did HE look like? What did HE smell like?
Since I’d earlier given the location of The Critters from Planet Zero as Seattle, I decide to place the motel (what is its name?) on I-90, just south of the city. I will name the motel…
At 6:02 the phone rings. I stop typing long enough to read the phone’s screen, which tells me the caller is named SPAM. I decline the call, think for a while, then finally decide that the motel is named Melody’s Motel, because I like alliteration a lot. After typing a few lines, though, I start second-guessing the name. Won’t “Melody’s” be a too-cheerful name for a motel I’d envisioned as seedy? I couldn’t name it Messy Motel, which is also alliterative, but “Messy” is too on-the-nose.
At 6:36 I decide to come back to the as-yet-unnamed motel later since Brian still has his foot in the air and decided that I’d be better off backtracking to Chapter Three, where I’d first introduced the Brian character, but hadn’t yet gotten around to describing him.
So I scroll back, where Brian sets eyes on Rita for the first time, and decides that she might be…
At 6:51 the phone rings again, and it’s my old friend SPAM. As soon as I decline her call, there’s another shriek, this time from the bathroom. By the time I’ve managed to get the toilet paper roll away from the two Siamese cats, it is 7:13 a.m. Brian’s foot is still in the air at the unnamed motel on I-90, but first things first, right? I shoo the cats into the living room, gather up the toilet paper, and flush it. On my way back to my den, my husband, who has just returned from his morning walk in the nearby desert, tells me about an article he read about rising temperatures, and that we might want to think about moving to Alaska or Vancouver or someplace like that. I tell him I’m game, that I’m as tired as he is of dust storms, but that he’ll have to be the one taking care of the details because I don’t have time. Brian’s foot is still in the air! Sensitive to my problem, Hubby heads for his own computer to look real estate prices in Anchorage.
At 7:32, after failing to come up with a name for the seedy motel, it occurs to me that setting the book in Chicago it might be wiser, even though I’d only been there once, and I was two years old at the time. Yes, a Chicago setting might be difficult, but I liked the idea of Brian transporting Rita via boat on that big lake – what was its name? A little research might be called for here, but I’ve always loved research.
At 7:46 a.m., Brian’s foot is still in the air, but I’ve learned that lake near Chicago is Lake Michigan.
Posted March 21, 2026
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Lear Jet Dreams
by Betty Webb
When I was 14 and wrote my first novel—Desert Mane—I had an idea of what a writer’s life was like. Big prizes (Pulitzers, Pushcarts, and Nobels), adulation, and enough money for me to fly around in my own Lear Jet. It didn’t matter to me then that I was writing in my grandmother’s basement, or that I was missing sleep because I was sneaking out of bed—on a school night!—to commune with the typewriter I’d hidden in the basement.
I didn’t care that the basement was a chilly, dank place, because as soon as my book was published, I’d start living the life I was destined for.
Well, Desert Mane didn’t get published, so I gave up.
Now I’m in the process of working on my 24th novel, and I no longer have an “idea” of what a writer’s life is like. Some prizes, yes, but no Pulitzers, Pushcarts, or Nobels. Some money, yes, but not yet the kind of money that would buy my longed-for Lear Jet.
As fir “adulation,” just typing that word makes me grin. Sure, there are people out there who like my work (mystery novels, 10 of them actually starting with the word Desert), but my fans are sometimes eclipsed by critics who visit my Facebook page to alert me to my typos, plot holes, double-negatives, and run-on sentences.
Sometimes, they’re even right.
In order to get a handle on this sort of thing, early in my career I actually sent a rough, not-ready-for-prime time-manuscript to one of my online buddies to critique (by then we were on a first-name basis, but I’ll just call him “Joe”). Joe took two weeks to read the MS, which was about a serial killer, but when he was done, there was so much red ink on my manuscript it looked like the paper was bleeding.
Disappointed, I bellied up to the bar (as we writers are prone to do), and read Joe’s notes. Frankly, I was surprised how often Joe was right. Yeah, I was too fond of long sentences, and yeah, I was a sloppy typist, and yeah, serial killers were already a thing, but…
The real problem, as Joe saw it, was that my female serial killer solved her problems simply by stabbing to death just about everyone who’d irritated her. “Too much blood,” he’d written. “Besides, poison is more of a woman’s game, not stabbing.”
“But she’s an independent, modern woman,” I emailed back. “My book isn’t about some sweet old granny who runs a boarding house for elderly lodgers. That’s been done.”
Joe’s return was, “She’s also too aggressive, so tone her down. And as for the title—Vengeance Is Mine—I don’t like that, either. Why not Their Blood Ran Cold? And as long as we’re talking about characters, I don’t think you did a very good job with the film director victim, either. He was such an awful creep that I almost enjoyed seeing him stabbed to death.”
“That was kind of the point,” I explained.
“Say, how about changing your protagonist to male, so he can be a priest?”
“A priest serial killer? I don’t want to change her gender.”
“Okay, then how about making her a nun?”
“A serial killing nun?”
“Sure. Serial-killing nuns haven’t been done yet.”
“Hmm,” I typed.
“Oh, one more thing,” Joe emailed. “The victims’ blood would be WARM as they bled out.
At this point, I gave up on Vengeance Is Mine/Their Blood Ran Cold and decided to return to my many years’-old manuscript Desert Mane. I drug the MS out of storage and speed-read through it. In the beginning, 14-year-old Lizzie Byron, of Detroit, Michigan, stows away on a ship and sails to Arabia. Once there, she finds a wild black stallion running up and down the sand dunes. Owing to Lizzie’s expertise with wild horses, she soon gentles him, names him “Flame,” and takes him back to America, where she enters him in the Kentucky Derby, with her listed as jockey. Flame wins the Derby and goes on to win the Preakness and the Belmont – thus capturing the Triple Crown.
Now all I have to do is make Desert Mane more believable than a serial killer nun, because I really, really need that Lear Jet.
Posted February 23, 2026
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LEARNING TO READ FROM TRUE CONFESSIONS MAGAZINE
by Betty Webb
Last month I blogged about learning to read around the age of four from my grandmother’s Bible and my Aunt Verla’s subscription to True Confessions magazine.
Not that I had much choice – I lived on a farm in the Cotton Belt of SE Missouri. Anyway, writing about it jogged my memory enough that I decided to order a March 1950 copy of the magazine (yes, I’m that old).
Now that I’ve read the thing cover to cover, I’m flabbergasted that my relatives would even let me anywhere near that magazine, let along teach me to read from it! But they did, and here I am, all these years later, not only an addictive reader of @ two books per week, but also a professional writer (20 years in journalism, 20 years as a mystery novelist).
So, I guess it worked.
Anyway, here are some of the things I learned from True Confessions at a too-tender age. First, that women wrote things like, Mardi Gras Bride (A man, a bottle, and a big float); Hotel Weekend (My husband doesn’t want me anymore, so why shouldn’t I accept happiness where I find it?); and Desperado’s Sweetheart (Frankie was in prison for life, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind!). The women’s names were all lovely, names like Thyra, Hedda, Doris, Alma, etc.
These heart-stoppers were all—theoretically—non-fiction.
But every now and then, women would delve into what more appeared to be real non-fiction (still written by women), such the series Glamor Careers, which in the March issue was titled “So You Want To Be a Secretary.” Another non-fiction article was “Little Girls Love Curls,” and gave step-by-step instructions on the joy of giving your eight-year-old daughter a home-permanent.
Many years later, during my life as a reporter and book critic, I interviewed quite a number of writers, which included three authors who told me they began their careers free-lancing for magazines like True Confessions. Although they used female pen names, all three were male.
No, I’m not giving you their true names, Gentle Reader, because they made me promise not to. But I can say that you’d recognize at least one of them. These men were quick to defend their work when I pointed out the whopping dose of masochism that seemed to appear in each of their “true” stories.
Writer #1 said, “Yes, the women I pretended to be all led miserable lives, but if you study my stories carefully, you’ll see I always ended them on a note of hope.”
Writer #2 responded, “I was broke, so it was either write stuff like that, or rob a liquor store, and since I didn’t want my kids to have to visit me in prison…”
Writer #3 (the most famous of the trio) said, “Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was a bit masochistic, too, so what’s the big deal?”
None of them mentioned that their stories helped a little farm girl learn how to read. But then again, I’d been too embarrassed to admit it to them.
Posted: January 16, 2026
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Blathering About Books
by Betty Webb
I don’t know why this hadn’t occurred to me before, but when it comes to books, I’m a hard-core addict.
It all began when I was about three years old and living with my grandparents on a cotton farm in southeast Missouri. My grandmother, Mary Alice Webb, was a reverent, church-going woman, and I couldn’t help but notice that as soon as she’d done her chores for the day, she’d sit on the front porch glider and read from a thing she called a “Bible.” Being a nosy little girl, I’d climb onto the glider beside her and watch as she turned the pages. That’s when I learned that three certain marks stood for the word “the,” so I’d gleefully read that word out loud to earn a hug.
The other words in that Bible-thing tended to be long and complicated, and often, downright scary. So somewhere along the line – I think I’d just turned four – I started “reading” with my Aunt Verla, who lived in a farmhouse just down the road. Aunt Verla’s “bible” was named True Confessions Magazine,” which had larger print, and the stories in them were almost (but not quite), as scary as in Grandma’s book. Thanks to True Confessions, I learned to recognized even more words.
Then a wonderful thing happened. Once a month, a big bus-like thing rolled down our dirt road and stopped in front of our farm. It was called a “bookmobile” and was filled with books that appeared to have been written just for little girls like me. Thanks to the bookmobile, my recognition of words increased dramatically, and soon I was reading everything in print: the backs of cereal boxes; the Sears catalogue; other people’s mail.
Now let’s fast-forward ten years, to when my family sold the farm and moved to the Big City to pursue more financially-successful areas of commerce. I was still addictively reading everything I could get my hands on. But one day – I was 14 at the time – I decided to write a book, just to see if I could. So writing one page per day for an entire year, I churned out a 365-page book titled Desert Mane. It was about a 14-year-old girl who runs away from home, tames a wild stallion, and wins the Kentucky Derby.
That improbable (and unpublished) manuscript was lost years ago, but no matter. More books—some of them my own—now crowd my library shelves, and my life is the richer for them. Yet everything traces back to that porch on a Missouri cotton farm where I first learned that squiggly black marks on paper could actually speak to me. Thanks to those glorious books, written by so many adventuresome authors, I’ve made friends with dragons, kissed a toad pretending to be a prince, and rode a rocket ship to Mars. And when it comes to my own writing, I’ll always be grateful to Desert Mane for teaching me an invaluable writing (and life) lesson: one page at a time…
One day at a time.
12-15-2025
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Decisions, Decisions
by Betty Webb
Today I woke up wanting to kill someone.
After all, I’ve written 20 mystery novels covering around 60 murders in total. And most of the victims deserved their grisly fates. One of them was a polygamist “prophet” in northern Arizona (Desert Wives). Another was a child molester who, through a glitch in the law, was released early from prison (Desert Vengeance). And then, of course, there was the slaughter of thousands in Desert Wind, and…
Heck, I’ve even killed people in friendly, squeaky-clean zoos, where the animals—although never harmed—keep witnessing multiple human deaths. Such as the shocked koala in The Koala of Death, and the grumpy llama in The Llama of Death.
I’ve committed murders all over the place, even during the Roaring Twenties in Paris, France, where an American ex-pat gets involved in a murder that makes her look rather homicidal herself (Lost in Paris).
So, you see, it’s not at all unusual for me to wake up thinking about murder.
The problem is that the book I’m working on now is a sweet story about two little aliens from another planet who are doing research work here on Earth, when a woman in a small Missouri farm town mistakes them for cats.
Nobody is getting killed in this as-yet-untitled book. Why, even the aliens are so harmless they don’t even stick probes up people’s butts.
But, oooooh, I really want to off at least one person! After all, murder is what I’m known for, isn’t it? And it is sooooo addictive.
Maybe I could kill Owen, the sculptor who’d jilted Dani, my protagonist, at the high school prom. I’d love to kill that rat. Then again, that snippy real estate agent deserves to die. After all, she’s planning to sell an entire peach orchard to a developer known for building ugly shopping malls.
But I’ve pledged not to kill anyone in this book, and I always keep my promises.
Well, usually.
11-14-2025
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