My new phone arrived on Monday and I’m super excited about it. My old one was slowly becoming toast and I needed something reliable to keep up with my imagination. I’ve been playing with speech to text for story writing. Let me tell you, it’s a challenge. I usually feel like a three-year-old hopped up …
Writing During A Heat Wave
If you watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you may recall a scene where she’d just saved the world (again) and she told Giles how badly her brain was fried. Giles started poetically waxing on about the events that had just occurred and Buffy looked at him and repeated, “Fire bad, tree pretty.” That’s how …
Tough Job
It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it. What’s a tough job you ask? Finding suitably yummy men to be on my book covers. All these naked muscle-y chests… what’s a girl to do. Honestly, it’s a good thing my husband doesn’t have a clear view of my computer screen. I’m not so …
New Editing Toy
I’m going to geek out here for a minute, so I’ll beg your indulgence. I’ve been going cross-eyed while editing the Haythen Construction Series. My brain definitely leans toward story-telling and away from things like apostrophes and not overusing my ‘buts’. Seriously, the number of wayward apostrophes when I type is unreal. Some day I’ll …
Getting To Know Me
I live with my husband near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. I’ve adopted his family as my own and manage to have (for the most part) avoided being the evil step-mother. Not so hard, since his kids are grown with families of their own. Through the pandemic, I started writing again. It had always been my …
Creating An Identity
As I get ready to publish for the first time in almost a decade, I realize much has changed. All of the popular novelists do newsletters and blogs and interact on social media. These were new, unexplored and wild frontiers last time I tried to do this… and I do want to be one of …
Where do stories come from?
On a writers’ forum, someone posed the question. “Where do your story ideas come from?” For me, it’s largely environmental. I pull characters and situations/plots from real life. I may hear a snippet of conversation while waiting in line for a cup of coffee, or I see someone and wind a story around them. Example: …
Fictional Universe
As a reader, I love reading stories from the same universe. It’s like unexpectedly bumping into an old friend. I am the worst at remembering things like author’s names and book titles. I’m the same with songs. I can’t tell you the band or album’s name but I can hum you the tune and sing …
Like A Snapped Elastic
Ever played with a sling shot or even just stretched an elastic too far and then watched it overshoot your hand when it’s released. Flinging whatever was bound by the catapult to the four winds That, dear friends, is what my brain is like these days. Life got in the way and I stopped writing …
Book Lengths
I have to admit, I love the new book lengths which have emerged with the advent of e-books. With print books, romances needed to be around the 200 page mark to be published. Shorter stories weren’t profitable to print. As a writer, 75-100 pages seems to be my sweet spot. These novels are long enough …