Career advice

One of the things I have always enjoyed about reading romance is the happily-ever-after. I’m perfectly fine with terrible pain and trauma happening to all of the characters so long as they kiss and hold hands at the end. And as a romance writer I often enjoy figuring out how I’m going to get these…

The character of Stephen gave me significant trouble throughout the various iterations of The Wanderer. He is of course a key character because without him there’s no story, but I had a great deal of difficulty getting to know him. In early drafts I gave him his own viewpoint scenes. This process usually helps me…

I started this morning trying to remember the phrase for “quotation marks.” I came up with “word hole.” Which, in fact, is a perfect description of how I feel about my current work-in-progress, an apparently neverending story that just isn’t quite there yet. All the words go in and nothing comes out. Well, not yet….

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…

As the novelist Haruki Murakami says, “By viewing it through an unreal lens, the world looks more real.” One of the reasons I enjoy writing fantasy and paranormal and have basically given up writing contemporary romance is because fantastical settings allow me to explore big questions in a way that isn’t mundane or implausible. I…

When I was writing The Wanderer, in several scenes I showed Lucinda making offerings to the gods in the morning. At one point she feels the breath of Leoma on her face. Leoma is the Old English word for ray of light, and I figured it was an apt name for the god of the…