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The Twist Podcast 341: Slava Ukraine, Unfunny Comics, and Our Twist Election Hot Takes
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose for an election special. Plus we stand with Ukraine, and demolish “Comedian” Shane Gillis.
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New from Your Write Path: Your Life, Your Story, Your Legacy
Your Life, Your Story, Your Legacy
Every life holds a story worth keeping, and too many are lost because we didn’t write them down. With Life Writing, I help people turn their memories into a finished book their families can hold, share, and pass down for generations.
After facilitating journaling and writing workshops for the past three years, I’m now offering to help you get your legacy down on paper. If you’d like to include photos, audio of you own narration, and even video, consider reaching out.
As a two-time Emmy Award–winning writer, author of fifteen novels, and a Certified Guided Autobiography Instructor, I’ve spent my career shaping stories. I’m still an author, still a workshop guide, and still here for whatever you’d like to accomplish.
From First Idea to Finished Book
With patience and time, listening carefully to what you want, I’ll guide you through every step:
- Finding your story. Together we explore the memories, people, and turning points that matter most, and uncover the themes that tie your life together.
- Building the outline. We shape those memories into a clear structure, so the project feels manageable instead of overwhelming.
- Writing it down. Write it yourself with my coaching and feedback, or let me help draft it from our conversations, in your voice.
- Editing and polishing. Careful editing makes your story read smoothly while keeping it unmistakably yours.
- Creating the book. I’m able to handle design, cover, and publishing through my own imprint, so you end with a real, professionally printed book, whether you want 10 copies or 50. It’s your story, and your choice.
Whether you want to preserve family history, share hard-won lessons, or simply make sense of the road you’ve traveled, you don’t have to do it alone. Your life is a story, and you’re the storyteller.
Let’s Begin
Contact me through through Your Write Path to talk about your legacy book.
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Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Devil’s Wood Audiobook (Chapers 6 and 7)
Follow author Mark McNease deep into the Devil’s Wood.
An ancient people. A tree that has stood seemingly forever. And a walking stick that must possess anyone who possesses it.
Two chapters at a time, only on the Fearsome Fiction podcast. You can purchase the entire audiobook on Spotify and select online retailers.
Enter the Devil’s Wood. But be warned: you may never leave.
And now… fasten your headphones, and tell someone your last known location. The Devil’s Wood dotcom.
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True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Sarah Freeman – the Shapwick Poisoner (from Franklin Maw’s ‘Blood Evidence’)
The Shapwick Poisoner: Sarah Freeman
The following is from Franklin Maw’s Blood Evidence: 25 True Crime Chillers.
In the winter of 1844, a woman walked into a chemist’s shop in Bridgwater, in the English county of Somerset, and bought three pennies’ worth of arsenic. It was a common enough purchase. Arsenic killed rats. It also killed people, and in the village of Shapwick, people close to Sarah Freeman had a habit of dying.
Her husband, Henry. Her young son, James. Her mother, Mary. Each death was mourned, and each was buried. Then her brother Charles fell violently ill and died, and this time someone asked questions. The bodies came out of the ground. The tests came back. And the village began to wonder how long it had been living beside a poisoner.
On April 23, 1845, ten thousand people gathered in Taunton to watch Sarah Freeman hang. To the very end, she swore she was “as innocent as a lamb.”
Was she a cold-blooded serial killer, or a convenient scapegoat? Today, we open the case of the Shapwick Poisoner.
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The Twist 340: America’s Cornell Crisis, and a Review of Ann Cleeves’ Newest Matthew Venn Mystery
Join Mark and Rick for a retooled Twist as we talk about Cornell and America’s peak assault culture, catch up with happenings and news, and hear a review of Ann Cleeves’ newest, ‘The Dying Light.’
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Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Devil’s Wood Audiobook (Chapters 4 and 5)
Follow author Mark McNease deep into the Devil’s Wood.
An ancient people. A tree that has stood seemingly forever. And a walking stick that must possess anyone who possesses it.
Two chapters at a time, only on the Fearsome Fiction podcast. You can purchase the entire audiobook on Spotify and select online retailers.
Enter the Devil’s Wood. But be warned: you may never leave.
And now… fasten your headphones, and tell someone your last known location. The Devil’s Wood dotcom.
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Franklin Maw’s ‘Blood Evidence’ Now Available on Amazon (Guest Post)
I’ve made many author frients over the years, and Franklin Maw is one of them. I couldn’t be happier to see him get his first true cime collection out, inspired by his first true life: real crimes committed by real people, some caught, some lost to history, all captivating. Enjoy his guest post and announcement! – Mark
It’s Out. Blood Evidence Is Here.
I’ve had a passion for these stories all my life. Today 25 of them are in a book you can hold in your hands.
Blood Evidence: Twenty-Five True Crime Stories is now available as an eBook and in paperback. The audiobook is coming soon on Spotify, so if you’d like to hear about a Victorian poisoner on your commute than read about her before bed, you won’t have to wait long.
Some of you know how this started. I was ten years old when I read my first real murder in a newspaper, and I never stopped. I cut the stories out and kept them in a shoebox. I kept that shoebox through a lot of jobs, a lot of kitchens and a lot of years. This book is what finally came out of it.
I didn’t want to write about the same cases everyone already knows. You won’t find Jack the Ripper here, or Lizzie Borden. You’ll find Mary Ann Cotton, who buried three husbands and as many as eleven children in England before anyone thought to ask why. You’ll find the woman burned in a valley outside Bergen, Norway, who carried eight false passports and has never been identified. You’ll find the boy in the box in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who waited sixty-five years for his name. And you’ll find men who spent years in prison for murders they didn’t commit.
Some of these cases were solved. Some never will be. All of them happened, and all of them deserve to be remembered.
If you read it, I’d be grateful for a review. It’s the single best thing you can do for a book like this one.
And I’m not done. Up next is Young Blood: 25 True Stories of Killer Kids. It’s a harder subject, and I almost talked myself out of it. I’m glad I didn’t. Stay tuned for details.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for remembering them with me.
From a safehouse somewhere in Pennsylvania,
Franklin -
True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: The Soothing Draught – Catherine Wilson
Welcome back to True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast. Today’s case takes us to a Victorian sickroom, where the person meant to make you better was the one who decided whether you lived.
Her name was Catherine Wilson. She worked as a private nurse in small English towns through the 1850s and into the 1860s, sitting at bedsides, mixing medicines, and quietly becoming the beneficiary of more than one dying patient’s will. Husbands, lovers, landladies, patients. The deaths piled up for a decade before anyone thought to ask why.
This is The Soothing Draught, the story of the woman who became the first known serial killer nurse in England, caught not because anyone suspected her, but because one patient refused to die quietly.
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The Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Devil’s Wood Audiobook (Chapters 3 and 4)
Follow author Mark McNease deep into the Devil’s Wood.
An ancient people. A tree that has stood seemingly forever. And a walking stick that must possess anyone who possesses it.
Two chapters at a time, only on the Fearsome Fiction podcast. You can purchase the entire audiobook on Spotify and select online retailers.
Enter the Devil’s Wood. But be warned: you may never leave.
And now… fasten your headphones, and tell someone your last known location. The Devil’s Wood dotcom.
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True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mary Cotton – the Arsenic Widow
Enjoy this True Crime Tuesdays episode, brought to you courtesy of author Franklin Maw’s upcoming Blood Evidence: 25 True Crime Chillers.
She married often, and buried often — husbands, stepchildren, her own children, one after another, in a mining town that had already seen more than its share of death. No one thought to ask why. Arsenic was cheap, convenient, and nearly impossible to prove… until someone finally did. This is the story of Mary Ann Cotton, one of Britain’s first convicted female serial killers, and the quiet, domestic horror she left behind in West Auckland. This is “The Arsenic Widow,” from Franklin Maw’s Blood Evidence.
