I love Mary Higgins Clark

Poke fun if you wish, but Mary Higgins Clark is my hero.

Her writing isn’t critically acclaimed or earth shattering. She doesn’t strike a political nerve or fight for a cause. But her books are the ones I look for at the library or in airport kiosks. I picked up While My Pretty One Sleeps in 1991 and have checked-out, borrowed, or purchased all but four of her published works.

That means something.

I turn to MHC (you have to be pretty freaking cool to have your own fancy monogram on your books, right?) when I need brain candy, when I don’t want to think, when I want to immerse myself in a story and not have to look up a vocabulary word or rush to the end.

I don’t read her books to learn something. I read them to get lost.

And as 80 million copies of her suspense novels have been sold, I guess I’m not the only one.

Her bio is pretty freaking awesome too. She was a single mother of five (I think) and got up everyone morning at 5 a.m. to write. Then she put her typewriter away, got her kids ready for school and headed off to work. (For more details click here.)

I also blame MHC for encouraging me to write now. She said, “It’s the degree of yearning that separates the real writer from the “would-be’s.” Those who say “I’ll write when I have time, when the kids are grown up or when I have a quiet place to work,” will probably never do it. “

Do you have a “go-to” author? What is it about their writing that makes you come back time after time? Can you put that “thing” in your current manuscript? Would it make your work better?