Vincent H. O'Neil

I've given a lot of writing workshops over the years, and have posted most of the slide presentations on Slideshare, where they're free to view and download.

 

Four of these workshops were given at the Sleuthfest mystery convention in Boca Raton, Florida, and audio recordings of those workshops are available for purchase as MP3 or CD. They follow the slide presentations saved on Slideshare, so if you download the presentation (for free) and purchase the audio recording, you'll get the experience of the workshop.

 

Please go to vwtapes.com and type "Vincent O'Neil" into the Search box to see the audio recordings.

 

Here are the slideshows available for free on Slideshare:

 

 

Don't Miss a Thing: Brainstorming the full potential of your story, your characters, and your plot (Sleuthfest 2019)

 

https://www.slideshare.net/vincent287/dont-miss-a-thing-brainstorming-for-writers

 

Writing Action Sequences: You'll be lucky to survive (Sleuthfest 2018)

 

https://www.slideshare.net/vincent287/writing-action-scenes-youll-be-lucky-to-survive

 

The Never-ending Brainstorm: Taking your inspiration from a gentle breeze to a full-blown hurricane (Sleuthfest 2017)

https://www.slideshare.net/vincent287/brainstorming-workshop-2015

 

The Brute Force & Ignorance Approach: Writing when you have no plan, no plot, and even no point (Sleuthfest 2017)

 

https://www.slideshare.net/vincent287/the-brute-focre-and-ignorance-approach-writing-when-you-have-no-plan-no-plot-and-even-no-point

By Stacey Longo Harris, proprietor of Books 'n Boos bookstore in Colchester, Connecticut

Interlands by Vincent O’Neil (2013, Vincent O’Neil) is the perfect example of why self-publishing can be a good thing. The novel is well structured, reads at the perfect pace, and is hard to put down. There is no reason why  Read More 

Harlequin just released my theater-themed murder mystery DEATH TROUPE in paperback, and they did a fantastic job. They already published paperback versions of all four of the Frank Cole mysteries, and I've loved the cover art they've developed for every one of them, but they outdid themselves with DEATH TROUPE.

Although DEATH TROUPE is  Read More 

Libby Cudmore, a marvelous new writer from the noir side of the mystery world, just gave my new book DEATH TROUPE the greatest review. I'm practically speechless, so here it is:


Death Troupe is a mystery novel for writers. It's about writing. It's about the struggles of writing and what being a writer does  Read More 

In my new novel Death Troupe, the main character is a playwright. Creating such a role was a new experience for me, and I was surprised by how much work it turned out to be. I’ve read many novels in which the protagonist was some kind of writer (Stephen King’s The Shining,  Read More 

One of the great things about being an author is that I get to meet so many talented writers, both published and not-yet-published. We ask each other everything under the sun, but one of the most common questions in the mystery genre is how to begin plotting the story. Murder mysteries aren’t like  Read More 

In writing, it’s not unusual to reach a spot where you don’t know how to continue—or even how to get started. That’s a scary feeling. Some people dread such moments as the onset of writers’ block, while others view them as a subconscious warning to slow down because they’re  Read More 

The studio guy told me, “Kid, you have no future in this business.”
So I asked him, “Why?”
He said, “When Tony Curtis first walked onscreen carrying a bag of groceries—a bag of GROCERIES—you took one look at him and thought, THAT'S a movie star!”
So I asked, “Weren't you supposed to  Read More 

I’ve been writing in various genres for some time now, but only recently came to appreciate the link between research and inspiration. Yes, I know; it was probably always there, but I hadn’t really given it much thought until just a few years ago.

Like so many former students, somewhere I got  Read More 

One of the great things about writing murder mysteries is the opportunity to imagine the mind of the villain. After all, no matter how many times we say we’d like to kill someone in real life, most of us thankfully aren’t ever going to get closer to the mindset of an actual  Read More