writing

  • Well, my goodness! Somehow, 2025 is done, and a new year has begun! One of my favorite things for the new year is getting a new calendar (or in our house, calendars) ready for the upcoming year. Sometime in December, I pull the old calendar off the wall, grab the new calendar (cows this year),

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  • Well, it’s been a busy few days but not terribly productive in the world of writing. We’ve been nursing a sick alpaca for over a week—originally thought it was one thing and now the vet says it’s another. We have our fingers crossed for her recovery. It’s also that time of year to get ready

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  • We finalized the cover tonight – fingers crossed we don’t find anything to change. So here it is, along with the back cover blurb! Enjoy! E.S. It’s been ten months since Emily Collins watched private investigator Cian Ozdemir walk out of her family’s funeral home—not that she’s been keeping track. So when Oz calls in

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  • This is just a quick post to let anyone out there know that ProWritingAid’s Black Friday sale is going on now and lasts for another thirteen days. $199 (regularly $399) for the lifetime premium program and an even more exuberant price for the premium pro program. Am I getting something from ProWritingAid for letting you

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  • The Sand Is Always…Greener?

    I’m seven chapters away from being done (hopefully) with the heavy editing of Lasting Remains. Yay! Then I’ll pass it off to my beta readers and see what they think. Which means I have to figure out what I’m going to write next. This wasn’t even a question until a few days ago. I knew

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  • Happy Veterans Day!

    Before going to bed last night, I edited a scene from Lasting Remains that has this car (a 1966 Rambler American wagon—and those who know him are saying his name right now) in it, so I thought it only appropriate I used the picture for my Veterans Day post. I’ve been writing stories for as

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  • November 9th, and we have our first real snow on the property. We had some weird sleety stuff the other day that was more of a rain. But this morning, we have snow accumulating on the ground. Why is the picture weird? Well, I took it through the door of my office, so you can

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  • A discussion I recently had with a reader—okay, it was with my husband—was about why my characters do so much cooking and baking in my books. I have a few reasons for this. The main one being I’ve always enjoyed reading books that involve food. Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me and Agnes and the Hitman are

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  • A well-known piece of writing advice from Stephen King is ‘kill your darlings.’ What does this mean? It means after you’ve spent hours creating the most perfect scene (or paragraph) with witty dialogue, intriguing action, and immense tension, only to find out it does nothing to move the story forward—you kill it. Delete it. Erase

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  • I’m a sucker for writing humor. Not writing humor, although I don’t mind that, but humor that has something to do with writing. See Exhibit A above. I don’t remember where I first saw it (probably Facebook) but I laughed my ass off. Every time I looked at it. I still love it. I will

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