This is the first post of my new blog! Starting Fall by turning over a new leaf and starting to blog once again. Hoping to share again with you about writing, reading, life and everything good that comes along. I hope you’ll join me on this new journey and I look forward to spending more […]
Every author knows the experience: a character who’s supposed to be a supporting player suddenly starts moving toward center stage. Sometimes you nudge her back to the edges. But sometimes you think, hmmm, maybe there’s something there. That’s the case with several of the characters in the two Konigsburg novellas that make up So Happy […]
It’s been a year now since the pandemic descended upon us. As a retired person, I was in the enviable position of being able to go into lockdown without too much trouble. I live in a state where most people are decent about observing public safety rules and, although I suffer from cabin fever as […]
Most romances are written in third person. It’s not a requirement, mind you. There are first person romances, some of them classics (Jane Eyre springs to mind). But using third person allows you to use multiple points of view, switching back and forth between hero and heroine, for example, with the villain thrown in sometimes […]
Billionaires are in. If you go to Amazon and search for “billionaire” and “romance,” you’ll find a hundred pages of titles. Fifty Shades of Grey is probably the most prominent of these books, but there are lots of others, and the trend has been around for years. I remember reading Christina Dodd’s Just the Way […]
If I were given a choice between writing a synopsis and writing a blurb (and believe me, that’s a horrible choice), I’d go with the synopsis. Synopses are basically summaries, and most of us have some experience with summarizing. You’ve got three or four pages for the whole thing, and your main job is to […]
At the end of Finder, Emma Bull’s author bio has a neat thing: the soundtrack for the book. She lists the songs she listened to while she was writing, and it’s pretty extensive (also, from my point of view, sort of obscure). Bull is obviously one of those writers who likes to listen to music […]
Writing Wild Love, the third of my Brewing Love books, involved research—pleasurable research, but research nonetheless. When I first moved to Colorado a few years ago, I didn’t know much about beer. I mostly drank the big commercial brands like everybody else, and I didn’t drink much of those. But Colorado is craft beer central—we […]
So I’m sitting at my table at the big Shameless Book Con sale with copies of my Brewing Love series spread out in front of me. A browsing shopper pauses. “What are these about?” she asks. “They’re about a craft brewery in a Colorado mountain town,” I explain. “The brewmaster is the heroine of the […]
I started writing the Folk series (Book 1, Away, is available for preorder now) a while ago, knowing nothing about fairies beyond the usual. And by “the usual” I mean pretty much Midsummer Night’s Dream and a very obscure Kipling children’s book called Puck of Pook’s Hill. I knew I needed to do some research […]
