Vintage Quips and Poetry Spark Fictional Ideas

Vintage Quips and Poetry Spark Fictional Ideas

Authors’ ideas come from the strangest places. Here, I’ll share one rhetorical question and one brief bit of poetry, both published in USA Victorian-era newspapers (within 6 years of my title’s setting), that contributed to the writing of Isabella’s Calico Groom.

Book Review: ROMANCING THE BEAT by Gwen Hayes

Book Review: ROMANCING THE BEAT by Gwen Hayes

I found a book for writers, instructing how to plot a romance so all the essential elements are present, and the book was SO valuable, helped so much, I can’t keep this excellent find to myself. Come see my 5-star review for Gwen Hayes’s Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels.

BOOK REVIEW: Frankly, My Dear: Creating Unforgettable Characters by Melinda Curtis

BOOK REVIEW: Frankly, My Dear: Creating Unforgettable Characters by Melinda Curtis

My book review of Melinda Curtis’s new title for writers, Frankly My Dear: Creating Unforgettable Characters. This “craft” book on the art of fiction is a unique approach (as far as I’m aware), steeped in current psychology, to instruct, inform, and enable novelists to create believable, unforgettable, and consistent characters whose reactions to conflict ring true to readers. 5 stars!

Weather as a Fictional Character: The Marshal’s Surrender

Weather as a Fictional Character: The Marshal’s Surrender

Weather can be a character in a book, just like a person or an animal. In the case of The Marshal’s Surrender, Winter is a setting and a villainous character, hiding clues, endangering lives, impacting nearly every scene as a sense of place and timing. Have you ever thought of weather in the role of character?