Journalist & Author Deb Radcliff On The 5 Things You Need to Know to Become a Great Author

Be smart about dialog. Avoid sounding unrealistic, too sweet or too sour, unrelated or just dumb or naïve. So go over the dialog again and again until it is realistic and believable to the character and scene unfolding.

As part of my interview series on the five things you need to know to become a great author, I had the pleasure of interviewing Deb Radcliff, cybercrime journalist and author of the Thriller, Breaking Backbones: Information is Power.

Since 1996, Deb Radcliff has been embedded in the hacker and law enforcement communities learning their techniques, lifestyles, and philosophies that make them unique. Radcliff has won two Neal Awards for investigative reporting on cybercrime, as well as other awards. One of her crowning career moments was addressing engineering students and faculty at West Point Military Academy in 2001.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you share a story about what brought you to this particular career path?

I began working this cybercrime beat not knowing what I was getting into! It started when I took an assignment to work with…