Fiction Friday: Name That Book
Welcome to Fiction Friday, your opportunity to watch my mind leapfrog about. Each Friday here is a bit different, just to keep the boredom factor at a minimum. Sometimes you’ll read an excerpt from one of my novels, sometimes a friend or colleague’s. Eventuallythere may be some original offerings. I want to make this fun…
Read MoreWhat Do Decorating a House and Writing a Book Have in Common?
I’m going to make a confession. I’m addicted to decorating and renovation blogs. My favorite three letters are DYI. Do I have time for DYI? Of course not. Proof: I am still hand quilting the first quilt top I ever made back in, oh, 1990, give or take a year. Were I to try my hand…
Read MoreSunday Inspiration: “Sort Out All the Arguments”
I invented this rule for myself to be applied to every decision I might have to make in the future. I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness, and other things being equal I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons…
Read MoreFiction Friday: Death and Enchiladas
Welcome to Fiction Friday, your weekly opportunity to read excerpts of my novels or novels of other writers that I think you might like. Today’s excerpt is from New York Times bestselling author Diane Mott Davidson with the permission of her publisher William Morrow and Diane herself. This seems particularly appropriate because Diane was one…
Read MoreBrainstorming 2013
This week I’ve welcomed my brainstorming buddies to our Chautauqua hideaway to spend four days tossing around ideas about upcoming novels, everything from entire plots to key ideas we need help with. If you missed my previous posts about previous brainstorming sessions and the way we conduct them, you can find them here and here…
Read MoreSunday Inspiration: “One step at a time…
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has…
Read MoreFiction Friday: Another Time and Place, and Another Author
Welcome to Fiction Friday, my chance each week to share excerpts of my own novels or novels of other writers that I think you might like. Today is one of the latter. If you’ve followed my blog you know that author Diane Chamberlain is a good friend and one of my own favorite reads. Diane’s…
Read MoreW. Somerset Maugham vs. Elmore Leonard. Are There Rules for Writing?
Every writer I know loves to quote the following by W. Somerset Maugham, (1874-1965) author of The Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.” More recently ten tricks for good writing by the late Elmore Leonard, renowned writer of westerns and…
Read MoreSunday Inspiration: “A Grand Thing”
“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” – Agatha Christie Agatha is so right. Each of our lives encompasses a wide range of experiences ranging from incomprehensible depression and grief…
Read MoreFiction Friday: A Quilt with a Story to Tell
Welcome to Fiction Friday, a chance to share some of my stories with you. For the past two Fridays I’ve posted excerpts from the first two novels in my Shenandoah Album series. Today’s excerpt is from book three, Lover’s Knot, which was reissued in May as a trade paperback. All three of these books are also…
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