Dear Readers,
There is a moment I have watched happen in workshop rooms for fourteen years, and it still gets me every single time.
A writer is stuck on a body, cause of death, evidence and motive. We need a victim for the story to work, but the scene sits flat on the page, more prop than person.
So, we slow down together, and I start asking the questions investigators ask at a real scene.
Where is the blood, and just as telling, where is it not? What is the body temperature saying about time? What does the position of the hands suggest, and what does it quietly rule out? Who wants this person dead and why? What have they to gain? And how did they try to get away with murder?
Somewhere in that conversation, I watch the writer’s face change. The scene stops being a plot device and becomes evidence. The story gets real. That shift, from guessing to knowing, is the whole reason I built my crime writing course in the first place.
For fourteen years, that course has only existed in a room. I have taught versions of it in workshops, in universities, in small and intimate gatherings, to thousands of writers across the globe.
Every one of those rooms was a gift. And every one of them held only as many people as the chairs allowed.
This September, that changes. For the first time, I am bringing the whole thing home to you.
What’s in this crime writing course that makes mine different?
I am a coroner’s daughter. My father was a county medical examiner whose office was, quite literally, in our home, and I investigated my first fatality when I was eight years old. Later I went and earned a degree at the Forensic Science Academy in Los Angeles, learning beside the city’s top CSIs, fingerprint specialists, and DNA scientists. Everything I know about death investigation, I learned by living next to it and then by training in it on purpose. That lived experience runs underneath every novel in The Coroner’s Daughter series, and it is what runs underneath this course.
Writing the Killer Crime Story is eleven modules built to take you from a vague idea all the way to your complete Case File and a first draft you are genuinely ready to write. We start by finding your lane, because crime is a wide genre with many doors, and your story works best when you know which kind you are telling.
From there we build, piece by piece: the body and what it reveals, your investigator and what they bring to a scene, your suspects, your evidence trail, the forensic detail that earns a reader’s trust. It is self-paced, so you move through it on your own clock, and you keep it for good.
I want to be honest about what makes it different. This is the course I wish I had owned when I started writing, built from a life spent inside real forensic work rather than from a stack of someone else’s research.
You will walk away able to write a crime story that holds up under scrutiny, the kind a reader believes and a professional respects.
A tool you can use right now in your work
I never want to leave you without something practical, so here is a single distinction that will sharpen your next crime scene immediately. Writers mix up two ideas all the time, and getting them straight will instantly make your investigator sound like they know their job.
Cause of death is the injury or illness that ended the life. A gunshot wound to the chest, blunt force trauma, drowning. It answers the question, what happened to this body?
Manner of death is the classification of how that came to be: natural, accident, suicide, homicide, or undetermined. It answers a different question, how did this death come about?
Here is why that matters for your story. A medical examiner can often establish cause of death fairly directly, because the body itself testifies to it. Manner of death is frequently the harder call, and it is the very thing your detective has to chase across the rest of the book. The gunshot wound is the cause. Whether it was homicide or a staged suicide is the manner, and that gap, between what the body shows and what the body cannot yet say, is exactly where your mystery lives. Write your investigator standing in that gap and the whole scene tightens.
If you want twenty more tools like that one, the Crime Writer’s Toolkit is my free on-ramp, and it lives in the same world this course was built from.
Why I am finally opening the doors
People have asked me for years, often after a workshop, some version of the same question. Where can I get more? For a long time my honest answer was that the whole thing only existed in person, in a room, on a given weekend. I loved those rooms. I also kept thinking about every writer who could not be in them, the ones in other time zones, raising kids, working night shifts, writing in the margins of a full life.
So I spent this past year doing the patient, behind-the-scenes work of building the complete course, lesson by lesson, until everything I teach in person finally lived in a form I could hand to all of you. This is the most comprehensive thing I have ever made on writing forensics into fiction, and bringing it to my own readers first feels exactly right.
Doors open this Fall. The best way to be first through them is to get on the early list now. Everyone on that list hears the moment we open, and everyone on that list receives a launch bonus I am putting together especially for the people who have been reading along here on the Blotter.
I cannot wait to finally do this with you, not in one room, but in all of yours.
With gratitude, and a fresh pot of coffee on the desk,
Jennifer Graeser Dornbush
Author of The Coroner’s Daughter series
P.S. If you have ever sat in one of my workshops, you already know the feeling I described at the top, the moment a scene turns from prop into evidence. That feeling is the whole course. Come build your Case File with me this Fall.
