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…
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…
Rocky Mountain Writer #100
Jeffrey Lockwood & Poisoned Justice Episode #100 of the Rocky Mountain Writer podcast comes down to three things: insects, noir and a preview of the upcoming workshop this weekend on bone forensics. The guest is writer Jeff Lockwood, who earned a doctorate in entomology and who has worked for 15 years as an insect ecologist…
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…