I was thinking this morning about writing a post acknowledging the fact that things have seemed to move very slowly for me during the past year+ since I've had my wonderful agent, Wendy, shopping two of my novels around to publishers. No slower than they were moving...

My writing journey has been a long one. Most who know me know that. There have been times I've felt very close to being published, times I felt light years from any such thing. Times when writing was a joy, times when it was utter frustration. Times when I...

If you stop me on the street and ask me what a frizzen is, I can tell you.For the past two days I've been working on a scene in which a character of the 18th century who has never fired a gun before needs to learn to fire a flintlock pistol (not a rifle; those things...

Well, technically I don't write Colonial American fiction, but I do write fiction set in the late 18th century, which is pretty close. And if these nudgings and whisperings from characters in the wings mean what I think they mean, after my current work in progress is...

I thought about posting this question on Facebook, but realized it's a little more involved than that format allows. Here's the thing; today I'm finishing up a novel (reading) in which the main character dies in the end. I didn't know this was how the book ended when...

Flightless, because they are no more. Today I just wanted to give a shout out to a bird that used to grace our eastern forests, the Carolina Parakeet.  These bright, beautiful birds were driven to extinction by the early 1900s, but in 1787 they would still have...

Lately I've been blessed with good fiction, novels I've either hunted down or had recommended or merely stumbled across in the comment thread of one of the many blogs I visit during the week. Good fiction is subjective, of course, but I know it when I read it. I know...

Love Amid The Ashes Mesu Andrews Baker/Revell 2011 An epic story of love and forgiveness, suffering and restoration When her beloved grandfather Isaac dies, Dinah must follow his final command: travel to Job’s household to marry his son. After Job’s world comes...

This week I'm taking a break from writing Jesse (working title of my novel-in-progress) to do some brainstorming, scene-scaping, and plotting out in more detail of the last two-thirds of the story. I've never taken a novel that was only one-third written and plotted...

Having plotted stories on trails from the east coast to the west coast, over a span of twenty years, I've learned to never underestimate the power of a good walk in the woods to get the plot ideas flowing. It probably helps that most of the stories I write have at...