Our kids were playing marbles in the dirt road outside of her Borneo home. The electricity had been off in my friend’s neighborhood for hours. The stifling air added to her story, the heaviness of the moment turning into sweat running down my face. Yunike Hermanus, my Indonesian friend, was telling a part in her…
Category: Blog
Finding the Courage to Walk Away
“Sometimes, the thing you most wish for is not to be touched.” The quote above comes from the musical Into the Woods and offers a caution that doesn’t apply only to fairy tales . . . it’s important advice for publishing too. It took me ten years, and five full-length manuscripts, to find an agent (and get…
Best Writing Books
How do, RMFW? Shannon Baker and Jess Lourey here again with the Lourey/Baker Double Booked Blog Tour redux. Between us, we’ve published over twenty books (S: I love saying that because I get the credit for the bulk of the publishing Jess has done.) Shannon’s latest is the second book in the Kate Fox mystery…
The AHA Moments
Every writer has one—or two—or three. When I first started writing fiction, I was writing blind. I was a trained journalist and understood non-fiction, but writing a novel… Suffice it to say, it presented a number of new challenges. At the time, we were living in Frisco (Colorado), and there were no writers groups, no…
Phobia noun pho∙bia \ foe-bee-a
Actually, I’m okay with bees but those wasps, yellow jackets, mud daubers—whatever they’re called—freak me out. Speaking of fears, take Steven King—but don’t keep him—that guy writes horrors few humans can possibly survive, let alone think of: Carrie, The Secret Window, The Shining… Now that I think about it, I have an irrational fear of…