It’s not often a man strikes up a conversation with me in a bar, but then it’s not often that I find myself alone at a bar in a strange town where I know no one.* New York City doesn’t count—I met my husband at a bar there over 40 years ago, Max’s Kansas City,… [Read More]
Real-life soap drama shatters idyllic writing retreat
“Wherever you go, there you are.” That’s the most significant lesson I brought home from my week at a writing retreat in the Berkshires the last week in July. You can change your surroundings, plop yourself down in an idyllic setting with maximal solitude and minimal distractions, but it’s fiendishly difficult to jettison your habitual… [Read More]
What, me hire an editor? No way!
Hallelujah! HOPE DAWNS ETERNAL is finally ready to publish, or almost. Yesterday I finished combining the prologue and 36 chapters into one gigantic document of 265 pages and 78,318 words – longer than I’d expected, but an ideal length for the first book of a trilogy. Or who knows, maybe it’ll become a longer series…. [Read More]
Hope Dawns Eternal nearing the Finish Line
How do you know when you’ve finally finished your novel? Especially when it’s the first in a series? I thought I’d completed Hope Dawns Eternal, my vampire soap opera thriller, a couple of months ago, but when my husband read it, he thought I needed a more dramatic ending that wrapped up more of the… [Read More]
Is Sloth Still a Deadly Sin?
This New Year’s morning, I awoke full of good intentions. Rather than committing to the usual litany of resolutions I’ll never keep, I decided to focus on just one goal: I vow to write at least 500 words per day, which comes out to 3,500 words per week. If I don’t reach 500 words… [Read More]
My NaNoWriMo win: I may be a cheater, but I’m not a liar
I made it! Last night I validated my National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) score of over 50,000 words, and the site declared me an official winner. They provided a link to an online certificate I can download, with lines to fill in my name and book title, and links to order merchandise, including a… [Read More]