Saturday workshop question #1: What have I worked on and/or learned in the past year? A timely move to rural Nova Scotia ahead of a pandemic that closed the U.S. border opened the possibility to rewrite and publish one book and rapid write another. My author genre shift from romance to romantic suspense wasn’t as […]
News & Musings
Three Questions Two Workshop Hours
Book Bums authors will meet virtually this year. For the first time, our tribes of loyal and new readers won’t gather with us around tables and in rows of chairs or browse individual displays and ask us questions about our books. We won’t sign our name at the end of a personal note to the […]
The UnMatchables Case#1 : Danger Noted
Romantic Suspense Private investigators Eddie Emerson and Kelly Gillespie specialize in deep dive background checks for clients wary of an intimate partner who seems too good to be true. Their first slam dunk case pivots deadly. Jacob Malone has fallen in love with the lovely first chair cellist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Cherise Blanchet’s […]
Capital Strings
The fate of a nation and lives on the line Prime Minister Evan Reid “I hold a string that’s connected to every person in this country, every country in the world. It’s only one string of many. But if I pull it too hard and it breaks, the chain reaction I start could be […]
Friday Life Footnotes
“Happy Birthday, Daddy” “Well, hell-OOOH.” I grin at the sound of the steady, familiar voice, unaffected by advanced age. “How are you doing, Dad?” My voice travels back to him over 2,100 miles, from my new home in Nova Scotia to his room at a nursing home in my Iowa hometown. “I’m feeling pretty good. […]
Hello Again
I’M (ALMOST) BACK! After a 2,100 mile move from my Iowa hometown to Atlantic Canada last summer, I’ve settled into the Nova Scotia home and haven where the worlds my characters live, love, and cope with conflict are created. WHAT’S NEXT? A major rewrite and a new novel Both are in the new-to-me challenging genre […]
4 Tales From Heartland + Love Unlikely
IT’S HERE! By popular request from my book loving readers – The paperback version of Tales from Heartland – 4 short stories (NEW – Adele’s New Life in Love added to the original 3 short stories in the Kindle version) and the saucy, sexy novella of Rachel and Drew’s whirlwind romance Love Unlikely! While I’ve […]
Spotting Ideas
Where do you get your ideas? Whether at a workshop I lead, an author panel I’m on, or meeting readers one-on-one at a book signing, I almost always get asked that question. Here’s my short answer: Look around and listen. Ideas are there. What’s the story behind the shirt worn by the guy in […]
Resolve Depends on You
It’s mid-January and the resolve behind those New Year’s resolutions has dissolved, replaced by reasonable excuses. Most of these dismissive rationalizations involve time, or rather the perceived lack of it. I tried, we tell ourselves and others. I want to lose weight. But I just can’t seem to find the time to exercise. I’m unhappy […]
Fashion Treads
The fashion-defying old boots I wore for warmth self-destructed on my 62nd birthday. Flakes of crumbling faux leather I left behind lately whenever I zipped my feet into the comfort of weatherproof Totes with fleece lining left clues on my kitchen floor that I ignored. Much like the skin sags of age under my eyes […]