When I first started writing, I sought out advice from successful authors... thriller writers, fantasy, middle grade, romance, and even non-fiction. One nugget kept coming up over and over again... Write what you know. Now I don't know about you, but at the time I'd been laid off so I was a stay-at-home mom of three whose greatest daily goal was to fit in a shower. If I tried to "write what you know" I probably would have started a blog about how to clean kid poop off mini blinds (yes, that happened) and what to do when your three-year-old yells the f-word while you're wheeling your shopping cart through Target (he learned it from another kid at pre-school, I promise!) I was up to my eyeballs in what I knew, and was ready for an escape from the day-to-day. So I set out to write what I didn't know which meant I got to do research. In the first manuscript I wrote (which still hasn't seen the light of day) my main character had an affinity for whiske...
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