I confess, I like to control my environment. In fact, one of my favorite things about writing is that I can dictate every single aspect of my characters and their lives. If only my children and husband would give me that same power! Since my 50th birthday this past fall, however, I’ve begun to...
By most standards, 2016 has been a turbulent, surprising, somewhat devastating year. We've lost some amazing celebrities, the most notable being singers like George Michael, Prince, and David Bowie, actors like Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, and Carrie Fisher, director Gary Marshall, former First Lady...
November didn't turn out anything like I'd planned. I thought we'd have our first female President--but I was wrong. I thought I'd conquer National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and get 50,000 new words written in my current work in progress--but I was wrong. I thought I'd start a diet and lose...
I think it's fair to say that November has been a tough month for most of us. Those of us who are upset by the election results are feeling afraid for the future of our nation and many of its people, while those who are celebrating the results are feeling attacked for exercising their rights....
We are all broken, that's how the light gets in. -- Ernest Hemingway I just turned in the final Sterling Canyon book to my editor, which means it's time to start a new series. Similar to my St. James series, this one will be a set of connected stories (tentatively, the Cabot novels) centering...
I'll be fifty later this year. When I say that aloud, it still shocks me. I don't feel a day over thirty-five---until I look in the mirror. Sometimes my heart aches a little when I take stock of my thinning hair, my saggy middle (no, not the one plaguing the first draft of my current manuscript),...
When nothing is sure, everything is possible ~ Margaret Drabble I love the positive spin this perspective places on uncertainty, which is a state of being most of us otherwise dread. This reminder seems especially apt at the end of a rough week in the publishing industry (and for several of my...
One thing most authors stress about is book reviews: getting them, liking them, ignoring them, and of course, those pesky Goodreads ratings that show up before early review copies of the book have even been made available to anyone! For those who don't know, the number of reviews a particular book...
