Love is worth the risk
Once characters, fully formed and alive, populate an authors head, they and their friends and relatives keep coming back. You may remember the complicated family connections in The Ashmead Heirs, in which the old earl’s bastards were named in his will and given all the unentailed property. The Bensons and the Caulfields and their friends […]
One down and one to go in my parade of novellas. “Well Done, Harry” went to the editor Friday. To get it there I had to consolidate comments from my beta readers***, edit it, add an author’s note and my bio, and proof it word by word. For that last step, I’m now using the […]
I was up to my, er, neck in alligators last week with an electrician coming and going, calls aimed at hiring painters, multiple church meetings, my weekly volunteer gig, a Belles meeting regarding our planned collections, and follow up to that. In spite of my delicate dance through the swamp, I got a newsletter out […]
After two weeks of evening and nighttime storms, summer nights have been pleasant here in the urban wilds of eastern Pennsylvania for the past several days. We went to the Jersey Shore on the 4th, had a lovely dinner, and walked in the surf watching the little coquina shells burrow into the sand every time […]
Do you define the beginning of summer as Memorial Day? I tend to, meteorology aside. First of course, we remember the fallen, but it is always a joyful, if hectic, time around here. No parade this year, alas. We headed to the shore last week–feet in the surf, towel on the beach, toes in the […]
Big accomplishment last week! I finished “Music in the Night” and shipped it off to Dragonblade for inclusion in Dukes All Night Long. Now, by “finished,” I mean that I merged comments from four beta readers and did a light edit, considered a major insight from one of them, deleted half of the first chapter, […]
Last week, as I mentioned in this blog, I started a new novella, one for a Valentine collection to be published in January. I plunged in and wrote a few scenes but bogged down by Friday. I. Could. Not. Write. Saturday morning I realized why. I hardly know the hero and heroine. When I don’t […]
Annie Potter has been sneaking into Woodglen Hall, seat of the absent Duke of Glenmoor, for months, using a window the steward kindly leaves open for her. She comes to lose herself in the duke’s grand piano forte, an antidote to her miserable life in her uncle’s vicarage. A week ago a stranger interrupted her, […]
Spring has come to my world with a vengeance. Forsythia, hellebore, daffodils and their relatives, hyacinth are all in glorious bloom. The rhododendron is covered with buds ready to pop. Flowering trees are coming out up and down the street. My patio border is lagging behind. It looks like my hummingbird mint and ground covers […]
Trudging behind my young companion last week was invigorating—and exhausting—but we explored every inch of Rome, at least the old city from the forum to Castel Sant Angelo, from the Bourghese Gardens to the top of the dome of Saint Peter’s in the Vatican City. Awed by art, amused by Irish pubs, and charmed by […]