I spend hours and days and weeks figuring a story out. Plan and plot and scheme. Fill out my charts. Figure out Goals and Motivation and Conflict. Delve into backstory. Bring my hero and heroine together and find out what brings them there and what keeps them apart. What will they learn from the events […]
Letting Go
Sometimes my stories start with a picture in my head. A scene that I can so vividly imagine it will take nothing to write it out. The book I’m working on now started out like that. A picture of a girl, wearing a dress, long hair flowing in the wind, walking along the side of […]
Differing scripts
Ever have a conversation with someone that ends up going wrong and you can’t figure out why? Sometimes you simply give up and walk away, throwing your hands in the air trying to figure out what was wrong with the other person and why they held the attitude you did. Later, you talk to a […]
Title goes here….
My new book is coming out in a few months. As you can see, the title of this book is The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby. When you see it like that, all by itself it looks rather….didactic. Cliche. Tropistic – which isn’t really a word but should be. Meaning, covering all the romantic tropes. Cowboy. Baby. […]
Elements of story
I have to do a workshop in a couple of weeks about story. It’s basically what we writers talk about all the time. Story. How it works. What are the elements of it? What makes a good story? What makes a bad story? (sometimes just as important to know). How can I make my story […]
Ghosts
I have never seen a ghost or heard anyone who has had a ghostly experience. But there’s a part of me that gets a deliciously creepy feeling when I think about ghost stories. Spirits stuck between worlds haunting lives and trying to find someone to hear their story, talking in their ghostly, spooky voices. Like […]
Anatomy of a research trip
I am currently working on a series of six books for Love Inspired and I wanted the main connection to be a rodeo that the community puts on each year. Not every story is about the rodeo per se, but I wanted characters who were, in some way, connected to it. So I have […]
The Importance of Windows
There’s a cartoon that I used to have hanging above my computer. It was from the cartoon strip “Shoe”. This strip was about a group of newspapermen who are birds. The particular strip I’m thinking of is a classic. Shoe is staring out the window and Skyler, his nephew comes and berates him, telling Shoe […]
The personal side of research
We have about a dozen horses on our farm that my husband has gathered over the years. Most of them have come here as colts that he bought. A few of them were born on our farm. The one thing they have in common is that my husband, with the help of a farrier a neighbour […]
Resistance
This is a picture of something that is not unusual or new. Every morning I face this. And every morning I sigh at the job that lays ahead. I make a face as Resistance washes over me. I. Just. Don’t. Want. To. Empty. The. Dishwasher. I can’t understand why this seems like so much work […]
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