Happy New Year, friends! Welcome to 2026 – with an exciting, blank slate in front of us! Here are my writing goals this year: Write and Publish: Flames of Suspicion (February, I hope) Flames of Hope (April) Flames of Justice (June) Those will be books 5-7 in the Red Blood & Bluegrass series. Threads of Deception (maybe …
Category: Writing Life
Talk About Frustrating!
September 1st marked my “I’m back to being a full-time writer” phase of life. What made it fun is that I had two major conferences – American Christian Fiction Writers and Novelists, Inc., almost immediately. In fact, this week has been my first week home for the entire week since it all began! As you …
Refreshed, Reset, and Fri-YAY
Happy Fri-YAY! I’m fresh back from my annual spring writer’s retreat. I joined Susan May Warren, Lacy Williams, Misty Beller, Robin Patchen, and Tracy Higley for four-and-a-half wonderful days of talking, praying, crying, laughing, more laughing, plotting books, and talking strategy. We went over things that worked last year (obviously, I didn’t get to take …
Hours a Day
Starting this week, I will have six hours a day, three days a week that will be focused solely on book writing. The other two days of the work week will be spent blogging on my two blogs. That is giving me 18 hours a week to write – eight more hours a week – of alone writing time. I haven’t spent more than an hour or two alone for years. I am so excited to see what kind of productivity I can accomplish in this designated writing time.
Time to Write
Summer is officially over in our house this week. My daughter begins her first day of 10th grade on Thursday. The following Wednesday, my boys will enter 4K and Kindergarten. I have to say, I’m looking forward to school starting. I had hoped I’d be able to finish my current work in progress this summer, …
My Office
I think all of my years in corporate America has my mind conditioned to where I’m more productive and where I’m not. I’ve tried writing at the dining room table, and I’ve tried sitting on my couch and working, but I have always worked best at my desk. That’s one of the reasons that makes it hard to work when it’s just me and the boys. My office is removed from the rooms where they’re more likely to play, and I’m not very comfortable with that.
Corrupted Files
I’ve had several people contact me and say that the Topaz Heat that they downloaded from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble last week had a lot of formatting errors and what looked like typos. Things were out of place in the story, sentences ended and were never completed, and scenes were out of order. I don’t know what happened to …
The Trilogy is Complete!
Thursday night, I finished Topaz Heat. I read through it, made minor changes here and there, laughed and cried with the book (strangely, since I wrote it) then I sent it off to my beta readers. It’s out of my hands now (for the time being). In my opinion, it’s the best book I’ve written. Hopefully, …
My First Book Signing
I had my first book signing on Saturday at Bethany Book Room for the paperback release of Sapphire Ice. It was so much fun. I was incredibly apprehensive leading up to it, but I am not a “small talk” kind of person. I’m great in a chat room or an instant message window – but not …