In Farewell to Kindness, my hero’s servant and dearest friend arranged for his nephew to act as servant to my hero’s cousin, Major Alexander Redepenning, who is wheelchair bound after an injury. In A Raging Madness, the teenage Jonno is still serving Alex with devoted care. Do you have a servant or employee in your […]
In the last half of November in 2014, I was sent Farewell to Kindness off to beta readers and began writing Candle’s Christmas Chair. The Epilogue to Farewell to Kindness threw me a curve ball that took me more than nine months to find in the bushes. I lost the heroine of what was then […]
Book titles matter. A rose by any other name, Juliet claimed, would smell as sweet, but would people be as willing to put their noses close if it were called Skunkstink, or Fartflower? And titles bother me. Sometimes, a title will occur immediately, surfacing from the interior of my brain without any effort on my part. […]
My usual answer when I’m asked to make a choice between two good things is ‘yes’. Would you like chocolate cake or banana muffins? Yes. Would you prefer to have a bath or watch tv? Yes. Do you want to dance or have a glass of wine? Yes. And this last two years, since I’ve […]
Today’s Sunday retrospective reaches back to the second half of October 2014, when I was writing the last third of Farewell to Kindness. I was reporting progress—and hiccups—as I went. I finished the month with a photo of the printed first draft of Farewell to Kindness and the heading #amediting. A couple of days before […]
I was a busy blogger in October 2014, and some of what I wrote about might be worth a second look. I reported on research: Everything you needed to know about the dances at Regency assemblies and balls. The wonderful history and the rules of mob football, with a video link to a modern day […]
The contest is over, but Hand-Turned Tales is still free. Read on to find out more. Welcome to my blog. Whether you are hopping through the blogs or are a regular visitor to these pages, today you can enter to win here, and click on through the blogs to enter for more great prizes. Or […]
I don’t want to think too hard about what this says about me, but I love writing villains. I enjoy creating characters of any kind, and I’ll happily spend days answering questionnaires about my main characters. I really enjoy seeing the people in my head coming to life on the screen as I type, and […]
In our fictional worlds, virtue triumphs—it is probably just as well, therefore, that the villains don’t know they’re fictional, so they lay their mischievous, selfish, or downright wicked plans, sure that they will win the day. Today’s work-in-progress Wednesday is dedicated to the ways they act. I’m looking for an excerpt—I say eight to ten lines, […]
A day or two shy of one year ago, I dipped my toe into the water of indie publishing, wrestling with the intricacies of kindle direct publishing and the infamous Smashword’s Meatgrinder program to put Candle’s Christmas Chair up into the e-retailers in time for Christmas. Nearly 70,000 downloads later, Candle is about to be […]