“Follow the path,” my guide told me as he took me through the dark woods. “What happens if I stray?” I asked. “If you leave the path, you’ll die.” Sharp stones cut my feet. Branches caught my hair. Thorns striped me with blood. “This path doesn’t seem very safe,” I said. “If you leave the…
After what appears to have been around three years of inactivity, I finally logged back into GoodReads and waded through my mail and friend requests. I… have reviews? People actually read my books? This is very weird. A lot of bad crap sort of poisoned my feelings about my career before it ever got off…
Every Monday, I post a new writing prompt to be used for a simple scene or description. Write for five minutes without revision or rest, set what you wrote aside after the five minutes are up, and then get on with your project. I like to use Write or Die to keep track of my…
One of the hardest parts of writing is simply starting, especially when you have a big project to work on or something that’s personally important. Taking that leap to getting words onto the page is hard. I’ve known far too many people full of stories they never managed to finish because it felt like such…
As a home-schooled teen, I never had The Handmaid’s Tale as required reading. I was aware of the plot, thanks to my older sister trying to explain it to me once, but had little interest in seeking it out on my own. At the time, it wasn’t clear why that was, since I loved reading…
Artificial wombs and the immense impact they would have on society have been a fascination of mine since childhood. This fascination led to a lot of reading and understanding why it would be an incredibly complicated process to support an embryo outside of a uterine environment. I did research to try to understand the hurdles…
It’s been a hard year. True friendship is important–as important as family or a marriage–and it isn’t something I share lightly. Losing my best friend this year left its mark on me and I imagine Maggie’s loss is something I’ll reflect on for the rest of my life, like I do with my father’s death or my house…
Title: Hope for Nolan O’Donoghue (an Outlaw’s Mail-Order Bride) Genre: Historical Romance Length: 144 pages Release Date: October 1, 2016 Salt of the Earth Seven virtues and seven outlaws… When Hope Masterson is torn from her comfortable life in St. Louis, she has one way out. Falsely accused of a crime and grieving her murdered father,…
Before I pushed play I wondered if Melissa McCarthy would burst through a wall and torch my copy of the original Ghostbusters while I cried. The power of nostalgia is great and it sucks when something you loved years ago turns out to be terrible when viewed with fresh eyes (see: the Ruining My Childhood recaps on this blog), but can a…
In case you’re just finding these recaps, A Pirate’s Love is a historical romance novel by Johanna Lindsey written in the late ’70s. I’m a huge fan of Lindsey’s, but this book suffers from the awfulness of its era. Recaps start here. CONTENT NOTE: No rape in this chapter, but the mind games and casual references…
I make no promises about how often I’ll update this series, but I’ll be writing historical inaccuracy posts for the blog, as I have a lot of pet peeves. There are a bunch of things that get repeated so often in historical fiction set in Europe–or in European history inspired fantasy–that everyone has now just…
In case you’re just finding these recaps, A Pirate’s Love is a historical romance novel by Johanna Lindsey written in the late ’70s. I’m a huge fan of Lindsey’s, but this book suffers from the awfulness of its era. Recaps start here. CONTENT NOTE: Shockingly, there’s no rape in this one, but the mind games and…
