Love is worth the risk
However you celebrate this darkest time of year, I wish you warmth, light, joy with family and friends, and books—piles of wonderful books As to me, having celebrated Hanukkah with part of my family, I’m traveling to celebrate Christmas with the rest. I will see you after the first of the year, certainly before twelfth […]
This weekend I began working on a made-to-order story that I plan to give to my newsletter subscribers in December. At the start of any story one of the challenges is naming characters, titles, and places. For historical romance they should be authentic, attractive, and, especially in the case of titles, wholly fictional. Christian names […]
Is this crisp weather we’re having here in the urban wilds the end of summer or the beginning of winter? We went from one to the other rather abruptly. Meanwhile, Bluestocking Belles and Friends are looking at the very end of a project, the day Love’s Perilous Road is launched into the hands of readers […]
We had a productive week here in the urban wilds—with a little help from my friends. The big news is that Merry Belles is now up for preorder! I will go live December 20. I think you’ll like my little holiday homicide, “The Angel’s Announcement.” It begins, “They found the shepherd eight days before Christmas. […]
While the western US continues to suffer from dangerous heat, here in the urban wilds of eastern Pennsylvania, we’ve cooled down a bit, and there are other signs the season is waning. I’ve been peering over my monitor at the apple tree next to my patio. It is an aging tree covered in woodpecker holes, […]
This week let me share with you the challenges in writing about composers in the early 19th century In the opening passage of “Music in the Night” my vision was that Annie would be playing the Moonlight Sonata. The story takes place in 1820, and Owen heard her play it seven years before, in 1813. […]
I returned from Sin City this weekend ready to write and confirmed in the general direction of my plans. The master class on Tension and Conflict was super helpful and so were sessions on Female Archtypes, Marketing, and Medical History among others. Hobnobbing with other writers is always motivating and motivational. What did I learn? […]
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 […]