Janet Alcorn

Suspense | Horror | Romance

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  • IWSG,  Writing

    Frail but tough women and nosy but loving neighbors: my favorite character archetypes

    September 1, 2026 / 26 Comments
    Tips on how to fall asleep in a living room chair: 1. Be old 2. Sit in a chair

    Now that I’ve been writing for awhile, I can see patterns in my own work: I love to include music (and wish it were less expensive to include song lyrics), I’m a sucker for a good revenge story, I write about sexual assault a lot, and I tend to gravitate toward two favorite character archetypes: frail but strong women and nosy but loving neighbors. I’ll talk about those character archetypes today. But first: This post is part of the Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) blog hop. On the first Wednesday of every month, we IWSG-ers share our doubts, fears, struggles, and triumphs. Our awesome co-hosts this month are Kate Larkinsdale, SE…

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    Janet Alcorn

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  • Writing

    #nanoprep: Creating characters

    October 27, 2019 /

    I’m up to my eyeballs in #nanoprep, otherwise known as preparing for NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a worldwide phenomenon in which hundreds of thousands of people commit to writing 50,000 words in November. Much caffeine is consumed, much angst ensues, and many fingers ache from pounding on many keyboards. I’ve done NaNo a few times and “won” (wrote 50K words) the first time, in 2014. This is the first time since then that I’ve started a brand-new novel for NaNo. I have an outline done, and now I’m working on character sketches. One of the lessons I learned from writing my first novel…

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    Janet Alcorn

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