My guest today has one of the most varied resumes of anyone I have ever had on this show. He is: an Author / Filmmaker / Actor / Composer / Educator / Public Speaker / Consultant / Reviewer / Writer-in-Residence /CEO/ and a columnist with Writer’s Digest. And, most important for our purposes today, Clay Stafford is the founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers Conference, which this year will be held August 22-25th, in Music City of course. Clay is also the Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of Killer Nashville Magazine, and somewhere in there he has managed to sell a whole lot of books.

My guest today is the award-winning author of a dozen books, including three different multi-book series and two standalones. She is also a veteran journalist who has reported from more than a dozen countries over her long career, and is now she’s back in the newsroom serving as an interim editor at the Seattle Times. And somehow between books and the news, she finds time to produce a Substack newsletter – I am now tired even saying those words. So please welcome the very talented Gwen Florio to the Open Mic: Writers in Their Own Words.

I met my guest today a while back at the Left Coast Crime conference in Bellingham, Washington. She has been a magazine writer, a writing tutor and an editor during her career, but only began writing fiction about 10 years ago. In that time she has published several short stories and, in 2023, her debut novel I KNOW WHAT YOU DID, which deals with this fascinating premise: What if a bestselling novel fictionalizes the death of your childhood best friend, and accuses you of her murder? That is one hell of a premise to be sure. To talk about this and more, please welcome Cayce Osborne to the Open Mic.