Career advice

One of my favorite tools is my dragon fountain pen; that is, a fountain pen with a dragon embossed on it. It’s a nice heavy pen that feels good in my hand and is easy to drive across the page, at least when I feed it the right ink and paper. Sometimes I think I…

Whenever I look in the mirror, I’m always surprised to see all the silver in my hair. How did that happen? Last I checked, I was nineteen. Of course, with a twenty-year-old daughter, I can’t still be nineteen but I can pretend. A few weeks ago, I started re-reading the Travis McGee mystery/suspense series by…

To live your life in your own way is the ultimate success – and an ongoing struggle. I explore that struggle in my work and have experienced it in my life. The Wanderer, the first in a series of novels about a pagan medieval world, introduces my protagonist, Lucinda (called Land-Stepper) who must learn to…

One of the things I have missed in the pandemic is getting new inputs and having new experiences. These lead to serendipities in my writing (problems solved and new directions taken) and keep me engaged and energized. A few months ago, just emerging from our isolation, my daughter and I went to a harbor-side restaurant…

Though I spent the summer traveling, I have no reports of nearly falling off cliffs because I got too close to the edge nor of staying out all night in the rain because I failed to book a hotel room in the height of the season, and this disappoints me a little, not because these…

I’m spending the summer in Spain, which is the upside of being a freelancer, although I also have to work while I’m here, which is the downside of not being independently wealthy. I was on a bus to Seville when I had an idea for a new fantasy novel, which I probably didn’t need, given…