CRIME WRITER SG WONG ON HELPING YOUR CHARACTERS MAKE BAD CHOICES (MF GALAXY 181)

So you want to write mystery fiction, crime fiction, or detective fiction, but your characters don’t crackle, your plots don’t pop, and your mysteries don’t sizzle. What should you do? How’re you going make readers keep turning those pages? You need to listen to mystery writer S.G. Wong. Oh, there are other writers, right here in E-Town, who are admirable. We’ve got them in every form and genre, and they do amazing work. But there’s only a handful of people I know who are a combo of outstanding craft, outstanding teaching, and outstanding organising for the writing community. And standing tall inside that select group is S.G. Wong, the creator of the Lola Starke mystery novels featuring a hard-boiled but beautiful detective, a carefully-constructed alternate Earth in which the Chinese colonised what we know as Los Angeles to build Crescent City, and a crackling mixture of magic and ghosts. Such imagination has gotten SG W