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A Book Reading with Authors Mark McNease and Kim Cook, Lambertville, May 3 (Video Excerpt)
On May 3rd, 2026, in Lambertville, New Jersey, two authors came together for an afternoon of storytelling, craft, and memoir. Mark McNease shared excerpts from Blank Page to Bookshelf: From First Sentence to First Sale — his guide to fiction writing, character creation, and self-publishing — and Kim Cook shared from her powerful memoir, I Am My Father’s Child: A True Story of History, Mystery, Betrayal, and Forgiveness. Keep watching for a video excerpt from that event.
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True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Feature: The Black Dahlia
True Crime Tuesdays – A Fearsome Fiction Podcast Feature: The Black Dahlia
Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays. I’ll be sharing a true crime story every Tuesday on Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast. Narration is provided by my own Wondervox. Fasten your headphones for one of the most famous unsolved murders in the annals of American crime – or is it American madness?
They found her on the morning of January 15th, 1947.
A woman walking with her daughter through a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She thought at first that what she was seeing was a discarded department store mannequin. A broken one, in two pieces.
It wasn’t a mannequin.
The body had been completely severed at the waist. Drained of blood. Cleaned. Posed with a precision that suggested not rage — but ritual. Her face had been slashed at the corners of the mouth, cutting what investigators would describe as a grotesque grin from ear to ear.
She was twenty-two years old. Her name was Elizabeth Short.
The press would call her the Black Dahlia — a name she never knew in life, but one that would outlast everything else about her.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Genre Classic ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room’ by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 11 – 13)
Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday.
Today we continue our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young journalist and amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille — one of fiction’s most ingenious and overlooked heroes — as he unravels a mystery that seems to defy every law of logic and nature. Now for your listening pleasure, another three chapters of Gaston Leroux’s ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room.’
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Audiobook Sample for Kim Cook’s ‘I Am My Father’s Child: A True Story of History, Mystery, Betrayal, and Forgiveness’
This audiobook sample is intended for promotional purposes only. You can purchase the audiobook on Audible and Amazon. Narration provided by Kelly L’Heureux. Introduction and outro narration provided by Wondervox.
I Am My Father’s Child: A True Story of History, Mystery, Betrayal, and Forgiveness
In every life, there are moments that shimmer just beneath the surface of memory—encounters, decisions, and turning points that, at the time, felt ordinary but would come to shape the very fabric of who we are. This book is a journey into such moments: the recollections of a daughter navigating the joys and sorrows of family, the unpredictability of change, and the search for belonging across places and decades.
Woven through these pages are the voices of those I have loved and learned from, especially my father, whose gentle wisdom guided me through the tumult and beauty of growing up. As I open these doors to my past, I invite you to step inside, to witness the laughter and grief, the certainty and doubt, and perhaps find echoes of your own story along the way.
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AI and the End of Talent
AI and the End of Talent
By Mark McNease / EditorHaving been given something I know was written by AI and asked what I thought of it, as if the person had written it themself, and responding with “That’s very well written,” I realized that the end of talent – the years of development, the craft, the skill, that unique something that makes a writer a truly good writer – may be upon us. I know a lot of what I read now online is not written by humans, but it’s only recently that I viewed it from the perspective of someone who has been writing for 55 years and who has always enjoyed the thrill of discovering someone who was truly gifted), and realizing that AI is getting so good that it can make talent obsolete.
I’m not a hater. I use Claude, and find it very helpful when I’m stuck on plot, or I need to figure out a transition. But there is a not-so-fine line that, when crossed, makes decades of learning and growing and honing and crafting almost pointless. And that, I think, is the true imposter syndrome: not to believe that we are writers when we’re not, but to believe we are good ones when all we have written are prompts. I started writing at the age of 10 because it was and remains a magical experience, a zone of imagination that requires skill and time and effort and finesse and revision and listening and more revision and the silence of the blank page. To find ourselves approaching a point where “anyone can do that” with ChatGPT or Claude makes it all nearly pointless. I still want to thrill to the discovery of a wordsmith and a talented writer, without wondering if they actually wrote it. Will I stop using AI as a tool? No. Will I let it make me irrelevant? I hope not.
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The Twist Podcast Gets a New Video Promo
