Welcome to our Back to School Bash! What a wonderful time of the year. Fun, books, prizes–oh, wait–that’s our blog all year long, isn’t it? But this month we’re extra! Enjoy! I’m sure you’ve heard that as Christians joy and sorrow co-exist in us. The joy brought to us by God, and the sorrow of […]
How to Make the Most of Your Time
When I’m the busiest, I always have the most ideas for a book and the biggest urge to write. And, of course, this is when I have the least amount of time to devote to a WIP or new project. This summer alone, I’ve thought of an idea for a new book series, named the […]
Forgetting the Facts
I’ve written ten books. That’s only a modest achievement compared to many of my fellow authors. Still, it’s enough that I’ve now started to forget many details in my stories. One of my readers once surprised and delighted me by making an online quiz based on the first novel I ever wrote. I did the […]
Gotcha! by Deb Kastner
It can be quite overwhelming when an author is facing a completely blank page at the beginning of a novel. I know who the characters are and have lived with them for awhile in my head. I’ve sketched out at least a modicum of what is going to happen in the story. But here I […]
Are You a Wanderer?
Are you a wanderer? As in, “not all who wander are lost”? I happily admit that I’m one too. I inherited the wandering gene from my mother, and I sometimes wonder if God gave that special gene to creatives so we could all wander around and bring back what we’ve found to share with others. It’s […]
Poll: What book should I write next?
I finished writing all the books currently under contract, and now I get to decide what to do next. I have a few possibilities, and I’d love to hear which ideas most interest you. This is the fun part! Here we go… 1.) Football is My Boyfriend — After a breakup, Payton Wakeland finds herself […]
Write What You Know
Some of the tried and true advice out there in the world is “write what you know.” I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how much I believe in that as a statement, although I can make a case that what I don’t know, I can learn, and then I can write about it. And I […]
The Author’s Conundrum
When I began meeting with my writers’ group back in 2014, I encountered a new term, worldbuilding. It seemed to be used mainly by those in the group who wrote in the science fiction or fantasy genre. Sure enough, I found the definition online. (Whatever did we do before Wikipedia, or the internet, for that […]
Hope for Happily Ever After
I’m on the home stretch of writing Fiancé Finale, the third book in my Love Unscripted series. This is the fun part because I get to wrap things up happily-ever-after. It’s getting to the happily-ever-after that’s hard. You probably already know this from experience, but I’ll sum it up from a writer’s perspective. Growth is […]
The Black Moment
I recently saw a post on Facebook in which a reader asked for recommendations of romance novels that don’t have a “black moment.” If you haven’t heard the term before, the black moment is the point when all hope is lost. In CCR, it’s the part of the story where the boy does not get […]