Hello Inspy Readers! I’m continuing my posts about real-life novel settings, this time focusing on Los Angeles and Malibu, California. While my first two novels in the Southern Heart Series are mostly set in Oxford, Mississippi, the characters do end up traveling to California. These West Coast cities are very far from where I live, […]
Farm and Family
When I decided to write a series centered around a cattle ranching family, I knew there would be many hours of research involved. Ranching is more than a job—it’s a way of life, and it’s often an inheritance. You pick up right where your parents left off. I grew up on a cattle farm in […]
Dressing My Characters
If I didn’t have the Internet, I don’t think I could write. I could research at a library, I know. I can work a card-catalog like no one, and digging through books and discovering facts brings me great joy. But, there’s one thing that having the Internet does for me that wouldn’t be as effective […]
Diseases in Fiction with Janet W. Ferguson
Diseases in Fiction with Janet W. Ferguson Bad things happen in life. Fictional stories would be pretty boring if nothing bad ever happened there too. I like fiction that leaves me with a good feeling at the end, though. So, in my stories, people have accidents or injuries or fires or hurricanes—you name it—that affect […]
Writing What You Know: Character Edition
Research is a fundamental part of writing. There is an old saying that goes, “Write what you know.” While writing only what I know would give me a book or three, that would be the end of my career. You can only get so much entertainment out of one person’s experiences and then the well […]
Things Authors have to Google (and other ways we research)
Google is a writer’s best friend – or at least it seems that way sometimes! I’ve researched everything from bread baking techniques (for Danielle in Summer to Remember) to how to embezzle money from a doctor’s office (Spring Fever). While we often pull from experience from former jobs, relationships, or current hobbies, sometimes we get […]
Getting It Right
You can learn a lot from reading fiction. As a reader, I love when an author paints a rich story between the covers of her book, complete with settings so well described you can picture them in your mind, back stories of the characters meted out gradually so I understand why they act the […]
The Power of the Epilogue
Happy February! How is 2020 going so far? I can’t complain. We’ve had pretty mild weather for Ohio, and found our routine after Christmas. Now it’s time to see what God has in store for the “love month.” Speaking of love… When Entrusted first released, a reader expressed her disappointment that there wasn’t a wedding […]
Dressing Characters
by: Staci Stallings When readers think about the joy an author must feel when creating characters —the sheer exhilaration that here is a person under your complete control, that you can mold and form and make them do whatever you want (HAHA right!), I’m quite sure very few of them ever think about the issue […]
Planning a Wedding
One of the things I find most fun when writing Christian romance is planning a beautiful wedding at the end of a book. Of the five books out so far in my Abundance series, three of them end in weddings, including the most recent books I’ve written, Love and Roses and Love, Lies, and Homemade […]