General

It’s not everyday that our little county makes the news, but it happens occasionally. Today, however Caroline County was in the news in a big way, and not for anything that anyone who lives here did. You might have heard by now that Tamerlan Tsarnaev has been buried in Doswell, VA which is in the southern part of Caroline, about 10 miles from my house.  Personally, I don’t think it matters where he’s buried and I don’t really think it should matter to anyone but his family. The most important thing about Tsarnaev’s death isn’t where he’s buried. It’s that there is one less terrorist plotting to hurt innocent people. And by terrorist I mean a person who hurts or kills innocent people, causing mass terror to make...

Now that the bombers have been caught and America (especially those of us who live and/or work near target cities like D.C.) can let out that breath we were collectively holding through most of last week, I can get to that blog post that I had been planning before last week’s tragedy. I didn’t so much make a New Year’s resolution for 2013 as a sort of pledge to myself at the beginning of the year to step out of my comfort zone. If left to my own devices, I would be a hermit and by hermit, I mean never picking up the phone, only communicating through email and only going to the store to buy food and craft supplies. I am by nature and introvert with a capital I. This is one of the reasons that being a writer is a good fit for me. It’s also...

I am a plotter. I think I’ve mentioned this before. I’m always amazed when I hear people say they just write by the seat of their pants. I can’t even conceive of the idea of writing without knowing how something is going to end. Maybe it’s my non-fiction background, or my academic bent, but for anything larger than flash fiction I have to have an outline. I think it was probably said best by those wise writing gurus Strunk & White. “Writing, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur.” This is not to say that I’m never carried away by a scene or character into something that I hadn’t foreseen or planned. Much of the Alex Budge...

By pure coincidence, today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride & Prejudice, and just a few days ago I got word that Dermot Sinclair is the object of his first reader crush by way of one of the lovely folks on authonomy.com who has read the first three acts of The River Maiden. It’s incredibly gratifying to have created a character worthy of a reader crush and since I’ve had a crush on Dermot for ages, it’s nice to know I’m not alone.  Of course one of my first reader crushes is Fitzwilliam Darcy. Because really how can a girl resist a guy that by turns calls you plain and refuses to dance with you, tells you your family is and embarrassment and then goes completely out of his way to fix things when your ridiculous...

So, I’m stuck here with a sick child today which means no writing is happening. But I’m trying to make the most of it by updating some much needed information on the contemporary fiction series that I’m working on. As you know I’m currently editing/revising/slashing/burning the manuscript for The River Maiden. But wanted to provide a little peek into where the series is going. As I said in my post a couple of weeks ago, I’m working on outlining the whole series. With that in mind. I have given The River Maiden its own page and added pitches for the next two books Old as Stone and King of Mist to the Once and Future page.  Also on the Once and Future page I have added a copy of the ballad that Sarah is researching for her...

Recently on a self-publishing forum that I frequent, a much more successful indie author than I asked the forum if we had seen our Nook sales dry up. I was one of the few people who answered “No”. In fact, I have had a couple of months in the latter half of 2012 where Nook sales were all I had.  This prompted me to look a little closer at the difference between my Nook and Kindle sales and what some of the differences were. First, let’s review the ebooks that I have and the differences between them (in case you haven’t read them yet). I’ll try not to give any spoilers. With that said, it’s interesting to note that 84% of my Kindle sales are of The White House. This isn’t completely surprising in since The White House...