Love is worth the risk
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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? […]
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, […]
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, […]
Whether you celebrate Easter in the Christian fullness of Resurrection like I do, or spring and the goddess Oestra as the Anglo Saxons did, this time of year is about new beginnings. It seems I’m about to take a new look at some older works and begin again with them. My Dangerous and Children of […]
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 […]