Blog
As a curious observer of life, I blog on writing, marketing, my prairie - anything that interests me in the moment. I like to have conversations with readers, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment. I'll respond.
April 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the United States entry into the Great War later known as World War I. To mark the anniversary, I’m sharing some information I uncovered as I researched my…
Read MoreWhat makes a family? What makes a nation? What holds them together? What tears them apart? My guest today, author Christoph Fischer, explores those ideas in his books, The Three Nations Trilogy. I recently read…
Read MoreThe editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important – Dr. Maya Angelou Maya Angelou‘s quote resonated with me when I first read it. But I didn’t really get her…
Read MoreLine up for a photo. Someone says, “Say cheese!” Everyone grins. It’s automatic, isn’t it? But it wasn’t always so. Until 1900, smiles in photographs were as rare as hen’s teeth. Research into early 20th…
Read MoreMy novel set during WWI has had me digging into how the war affected Americans in their everyday lives. A popular women’s magazine of the era, Ladies Home Journal showed that even before the United…
Read MoreSince I’ve written memoirs and am close to completing my first novel, when the question of differences in writing fiction and memoir came to me in response to a blog post, you’d have thought I’d…
Read MoreSweeps of purple hyacinths. Multitudes of candy apple red, neon yellow, and peppermint stripped tulips. Majestic blue and white flag irises. A host of golden daffodils. Like magic, every spring my garden fills with this…
Read MoreWaiting can be so difficult. That whole “watched pot” thing. Whether it’s 30 seconds to heat up the coffee in the microwave or 2 weeks for eggs to hatch – time just passes so slowly…
Read MoreA fresh read of a manuscript points out all kinds of problems: flat characters, scenes that though beautifully written go nowhere, leaps in logic that were clear to me in the writing but not to…
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