Career advice

I’m trying to describe my computer problem to Ken (not his real name; he didn’t ask to be in my blog), the guy who solves all my computer problems. Me: “I’m in Spain, Ken. I need a new laptop because mine is starting to freeze up. And my charger quit working last week – it…

I originally conceived of Lucinda (from The Wanderer) as a younger character who has a kind of naïve faith that things will work out. Possibly this is because I started writing her years ago when I had a kind of naïve faith that things would work out. But as Lucinda’s story evolved from a simpler…

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…

Yesterday, someone kept telling me I was “superhuman” because I’ve dealt with challenges. I’m a mother who loves her daughter and made some sacrifices. That doesn’t make me superhuman. That make me a parent. In the past, I’ve been called “inhuman” because I had to make brutal, agonizing decisions about my daughter. That doesn’t make…

One of the things I like about traveling is that I always end up with a bunch of story ideas while I’m doing it. I need the butt-in-chair time of staying home to actually do anything with these story ideas but I almost never have them if all I do is stay at home. Which…

One of the things that annoys me in series characters is when they start off like the rest of us, living paycheck to paycheck, worried about the bills and how to pay for the car repairs and then halfway through the series they win the lottery and don’t have work anymore. I don’t mind when…