Just in case your New Year's resolutions had something to do with reading, too, here's a title for anyone who loves a good, suspenseful yarn involving creepy old houses, mistaken identities, and ghosts from high school past. In NEVER TELL A LIE, Ivy and David Rose seem to have the perfect life--a Victorian fixer-upper, a happy marriage, a first baby on the way--until a woman who claims to know them shows up at their yard sale. She introduces herself as Melinda White, but she looks and acts...

• Julia Latham Candle in the Window
• Leda Swann The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever
• Shana Galen The Jane Austen Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World

Acing Your Audition

It’s your very first scene that will sell your first book, whether to an editor or a reader. If you were an actor, your opening scene would be your audition. Welcome to Short Attention Span Theater! At the most, you probably have one to three pages to hook your reader’s attention, so every opening scene should be put to the following three tests:

1. Does it pose a burning question that can only be answered if the reader keeps turning the pages?
2. Does it give the reader the sense that in a single moment your character’s fate is about to be altered forever?
3. Can you visualize your opening scene on a movie screen, and if so, would you be willing to pop down $8.50 at the box office to see what happens next?

With my October 2005 Avon release After Midnight, I tried to accomplish all three of these with a single line of dialogue: “Our sister is marrying a vampire.” If you can answer yes to all of these questions, then you’re well on your way to one of the most exciting roles of your life—best-selling author!

Teresa Medeiros, author of Some Like It Wicked

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