Food has a way of bringing people together. We celebrate birthdays and weddings with cake, prestigious awards ceremonies are often catered, and many business deals are negotiated over lunch. A few years ago, my entire family cornered by grandmother to solve the mystery of her delicious chicken and dressing. There’s a reason it’s called a […]
Awkward Proposals
Was your proposal PERFECT? You know. Flowers, starlight, candles, down-on-one-knee perfect? Straight-out-of-a-romance-novel perfect? Well, mine wasn’t. Are you confused? I was, too. You see, my then-boyfriend and I had been dating for over two years. He was getting ready to graduate in a month, and everything was up in the air. I was stressed out […]
Sunday Edition
Happy Mother’s Day. It’s Mother’s Day today in USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In the UK, Mother’s Day was celebrated on March 27. I welcome our international readers to let us know if they celebrate Mother’s Day today or on a different date. I’ll be spending time with my young adult children […]
The Hunt for Treasure
Ever been geocaching? My husband and I first heard about this real-world treasure hunt in 2008. Back then, you needed a dedicated GPS (global positioning system) handheld to find the coordinates listed on a website (usually geocaching.com). (Now most smart phones have this capability.) Then, when you zeroed in on the coordinates, you’d find a […]
Unkissable (and other unconventional titles)
The cover is unarguably the single biggest draw to a reader in deciding whether or not to choose a book. A close second, though, is often the title. Just the other day, I read a comment online from a woman who couldn’t bring herself to read a friend’s book simply because the single-word title was […]
Summer Lovin’ + #Giveaway
Are you singing the song yet? ;) I know that May isn’t officially summer for some of y’all but that calendar flips over and my mind already starts thinking about summer. And I thought there was no better way than to get you in the summer mood then to talk about my upcoming novella, An Ever […]
Loving the Unlikeable
I was chatting with an author friend the other day, and she was bemoaning the fact that a handful of her beta readers had read the second chapter of her current work in progress and let her know that they didn’t like her heroine. So my author friend was trying to decide what tweaks to […]
Character Hometowns: Jasper Alabama #giveaway
Characters all need a hometown plus a life history, and it can become challenging to give them each a unique place to come from. An author needs to have some basic knowledge of that setting, so I mostly write about places I know. In Tackling the Fields, I went back to my mother’s roots to […]
A Day in the Life (part 9)
I hope you’re having a wonderful May! So far this month, I’ve attended a wedding and had a birthday. Pretty soon, it’ll be time for final exams and that big breath of relief that we all take when finals are over. And graduations! Do you know anyone who’s graduating this year? I do a weekly […]
Sunday Edition
Welcome to May! I’ll be your host for the Sunday Editions in May. When this post goes live, I’ll be home from Sydney after attending a family wedding. On a perfect sunny autumn day we enjoyed the lovely church wedding ceremony followed by a beautiful outdoor reception with amazing views of Sydney Harbour. I love weddings, […]