Fiction Friday: Lovers Reunited

Welcome to my new blog feature, Fiction Friday, where on Fridays–whenever I can–I’ll share a snippet from a novel I’m writing or have written. The snippets won’t always be the beginning of a story, like today’s, but they will always be something I hope you’ll enjoy. Today’s excerpt is from my novel From Glowing Embers,…

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Ah, Romance!

Right now many of my writer friends are getting ready to attend the Romance Writers of America conference in Atlanta.  In case you haven’t heard, romance novels are still selling well, generating nearly 1.5 billion dollars in 2012.  My old friends will greet other old friends and make new ones.  They’ll meet the professionals in…

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Sunday Inspiration: “Fear Nothing”

The bracelet says ‘Fear Nothing.’ It was given to me by my friends, and it was made for me and my friends during the period of time that I was going through chemotherapy. And I still wear it, because it’s a great reminder of friendship and how my buddies and others came together in my…

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Charm Bracelets: Road Map to a Life

There I was in a shop on State Street in Santa Barbara, wandering through stacks of items old and new. In a display case I noticed a charm bracelet, replete with dozens of charms, so thick with them, in fact, that I felt I was looking at the story of someone’s life. Why was the…

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Sunday Inspiration: “It is in giving…”

I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year and I took care of her at home, until she died in my arms in December…

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Somewhere Between Luck and Trust: Cristy Haviland

On Thursday I introduced you to Georgia Ferguson, one of two major characters in Somewhere Between Luck and Trust.  Georgia was familiar because she was a minor character in One Mountain Away, the previous book. Now, enter Cristy Haviland, a fresh face in the series and a young woman fresh out of prison whose own…

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Sunday Inspiration: “Literacy is a bridge…”

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural…

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Somewhere Between Luck and Trust: Georgia Ferguson

For an author, part of the fun of a series is choosing which characters to feature in upcoming books. With the Goddesses Anonymous series (debuting in 2012 with One Mountain Away) a handful of women are introduced in book one, each to theoretically have her own story as time passes. Almost immediately after One Mountain…

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Sunday Inspiration: Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy

If you’re just beginning my Goddesses Anonymous series, you might wonder where the title “Goddesses Anonymous” comes from. In One Mountain Away, the first book of the series, Charlotte Hale, the major character, tells her minister Analiese Wagner how meaningful the legend of the Buddhist goddess Kwan Yin has become to her. In Somewhere Between Luck…

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