The drive to the acute rehab center from my house generally takes about 25 to 30 minutes, but it’s rush hour and I-77 is a clogged vein. I’m a city girl, used to traffic, yet I find myself gripping the wheel from the stress. The traffic thins, and I peel off on I-485, the eight-lane…

I did it. I published four books in one year. I feel as though I just swam the English Channel. What was I thinking? I have no idea. I wasn’t thinking. I was just doing. After years of working full time and futzing around, waiting for the “time to write,” working on my historical mystery…

I love research. I can’t resist going down an Internet rabbit hole to find contemporaneous accounts of a particular event — like NYC Mayor Gaynor’s funeral in 1913. How crazy is it that there was an attempted assassination on his life in 1910, and then he died three years later from the bullet, which was…

If I waited for inspiration, I would never write anything. I think most working writers feel that way. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy my daily writing, but the will to sit and write does not come from an outside source. It probably comes from the desire as a child to be heard in a…

The girl opened the glass door and stepped into the small garden where a waterfall spilled into a pond and the captive butterflies began their morning dance. Dozens of them in all different colors and sizes flitted about the tops of the red and yellow flowers. Sometimes one might land on her head or on…

The Porch  First of all, it costs so much more than you think it’s going to cost. After countless permits and inspections, some guys come and lay a concrete foundation. Of course there’s more than one screw up. They get concrete on your “art” door. They get concrete on the siding. The concrete they do…

Grendel at the beach When I first met my ex-husband, he had a soul-mate dog — a smallish black lab named Satan. This dog had super powers. He could dive to the bottom of the swimming pool to retrieve a bone, he could leap any fence, and he once destroyed about twenty people’s shoes at…

(Photo by Ryan Seiler, Public Domain) When I was getting ready to publish my historical fiction series, I read all I could about marketing and branding and blah blah blah. Frankly, I was scared to death of doing my own promoting. Before I wrote my historical fiction novels, I had several books published by respectable…

When I first started The Burning Bride, I had no idea that Emma Goldman was publishing a magazine for anarchists called Mother Earth or that a 21-year-old man was leading an army of hungry unemployed men into churches demanding that they adhere to the teachings of Jesus and house and feed the hungry. Some of…