Love is worth the risk
“Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes When children appear in books for adults they are often the voice of conscience, the sound of a prophet, the whisper of innocence. It is the child who points out that the emperor has […]
Last week while meandering through the Barnes Foundation with a friend, I came upon Monet’s Boat Studio. The Barnes forces viewers through a series of rooms laid out by Albert C. Barnes to show the relationships among paintings in terms of such elements as line, color, use of light and so on, rather than in […]
As a new author one of my challenges is obtaining numbers of reviews. Amazon likes numbers. The more reviews you have, the better they like you. Numbers. Really. I’ve been blessed that most of the reviews for Dangerous Secrets have been five stars. None have been less than three. Everyone likes to read those five […]
Books be damned and women with them. So begins Dangerous Works First line Friday is a great time to celebrate the best first lines in books, but why not tell you about my own. Next week: Dangerous Secrets.
If you read my blog posts here, on the Teatime Tattler, or on History Imagined, you will have noticed they are frequently illustrated with paintings. They provide period atmosphere and imagination starters. Since the Dangerous Works, Dangerous Secrets, and Dangerous Weakness are all set during the late Georgian period of English history (also know as […]
This morning I thought to do a final pass through the current Dangerous Weakness manuscript to look for extra spaces at the end or beginning of paragraphs. That may not sound like much because you can’t see them in word processing, but the make life difficult for folks who format the document for Kindle, print, […]
The clicking you hear is from my hands flying across the keyboard. Much to do, Much to do! Blame it on travel. First of all I am back at the novella set in Venice I promised myself (while on the airplane home) I would finish this summer. I did a full run through and so […]
Tomorrow, loyal readers, I am off to hobnob with my fellow wizards. I shall set off on the winding road to the bright mountain where the wizards gather to share secrets. That is to say, I’m packing to go to the Romance Writers of America Annual Conference in New York City. Sigh. What occurs at […]
All this week Melissa Stark is featuring analyses of various books in her Elemental Story Telling blog event. The idea is for authors to view their plot through the lens of the Periodic Table of Storytelling and create a “molecule” that reflects how the tropes and other story elements relate to one another. What is […]
Writing is one thing; selling books is another. Many writers finally get their book published and “out there,” feel like they’ve finally climbed the mountain, and turn around only to see an even higher peak lying right ahead of them. There are grizzlies in those mountains and dangers all around. In the world of self-publishing, […]