Career advice

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…

I’ve always written what people call strong female characters in a way they never say, “He writes strong male characters” of male authors. I love strong female characters but encountered few of them in fiction as I was growing up, so that’s one reason I like to write them. Another is that I’m kind of…

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 tried to embody it in my life. The Wanderer, the first in a series of novels about a pagan medieval world, introduces Lucinda who must learn to embrace who…

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…

Every Tuesday, we go to the farmers market and I give Jessica four dollars to buy a chocolate-pecan cookie from the French baker (literally a baker who is French). And every Tuesday there just happens to be a second cookie that is broken or otherwise not quite good enough to sell to customers that makes…

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…