Nicole Dieker

Nicole Dieker is a writer, teacher, and musician. She began her writing career as a full-time freelancer with a focus on personal finance and habit formation; she launched her fiction career with The Biographies of Ordinary People, a definitely-not-autobiographical novel that follows three sisters from 1989 to 2016.

Dieker writes the Larkin Day mystery series. She also maintains an active freelance career; her work has appeared in Vox, Morning Brew, Lifehacker, Bankrate, Haven Life, Popular Science, and more. Dieker spent five years as writer and editor for The Billfold, a personal finance blog where people had honest conversations about money.

Dieker lives in Quincy, Illinois with the great love of her life, his piano, and their garden.

nicoledieker.com

Magazine Pieces by Nicole Dieker
The Melon Head Mayhem author tells us why he decided to become a writer, what happened after he started reading Stephen King, and why expanding a short story into a Killer VHS novella was one of the best decisions he ever made…
Some people judge books by their covers. I like to judge a book by its first three paragraphs. The opening sentences of a story tell you a lot about the experience you’re likely to have with the book—and since many readers turn to books to find specific experiences, skillful writers often use their first paragraphs to let their readers know exactly what kind of experience to expect…
I email other writers a lot—and, believe it or not, most of them write back. I could drop some of the names that are now saved in my contacts list, many of which you may have heard of, but that would be both inappropriate and indiscreet…
Rip ‘em apart and steal what you learn! If you want to become a better writer, you have to know how stories work—and if you want to write like your favorite authors, you have to know how their stories work…
I use what I learned, during those early days—not the tricks, necessarily, but the tips—to maintain a relatively consistent 1,000-word-per-hour output. Day in, day out. Here’s how I do it—and how you can, too…
I’ve written novels before. I’ve even written sequels. But this is my first time writing a series. My first time writing a collection of novels, with a cast of compelling and recurring characters, that can either stand alone or be read in sequence…
Larkin set down her glass of spiced wine. She wrote Is truth pleasant? on a yellow legal pad. Ben, at the end of both his breath and his tether, watched her. “Is something wrong?” he asked. “I know it’s pitchy…
It was a wet-fingered October morning, the air like a formerly-celebrated guest who refused to notice the repeated glances at the calendar, when Annilee Morgan Fox first performed real magic…
Nicole Dieker News
September 4, 2023
Ode to Murder, the first entry in Nicole Dieker’s Larkin Day Mystery Series, was listed as one of just 36 “Indies Worth Discovering” by Kirkus in their latest print edition…
June 12, 2023
Horror DNA recently poster their review of our anthology, OBSOLESCENCE, edited by Alan Lastufka and Kristina Horner. They gave the book a perfect 5 out of 5 star rating, saying…
December 16, 2022
Publishers Weekly recently published their review of Nicole Dieker’s Ode to Murder. We were pleased to read just how much they enjoyed this first-in-series cozy mystery…
October 3, 2022
We’re very excited to announce the second book in the Larkin Day Mystery Series, Like, Subscribe, and Murder, which will be released on January 17, 2023. It is the second entry in the Larkin Day Mystery Series…