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Showing posts from 2019

Looking Back at 2019 (and hoping it isn't chasing me)

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2019 in Review Well, it was A Year.  I hope 2019 was kind to you. I hope you found joy and created things and made someone smile. I hope you laughed hard enough to snort a few times and that all your tears were the happy kind. It was not my favorite year, to be honest. I lost my dear grandmother and faced some trials that stretched me to my limit.  But here I am, a little weary but still hopeful, determined to be and to do better in the days ahead. Wearing antlers with author Sarah Delena White In the midst of it all, I revised and edited 2 novels, wrote a few short stories, a couple poems, and most of another novel,  was published in Deep Magic's spring issue, and self-published a set of short tales about O'Neill (of The Mermaid's Sister). I met lots of nice readers at the book events I attended, and I had a great time with writer friends at the Realm Makers Conference and the St. Davids Writers' Conference. I drank a unicorn frappe (DO NOT ATTEMPT), explor

An October Treat for Readers

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New Tales of Old Friends     Hello, reader friends!  I'm pleased as plum punch to offer you two short stories featuring O'Neill and Scarff from The Mermaid's Sister. They're nestled together in a Kindle book entitled THE PEDDLER'S REWARD--which will be published October 29, 2019.  Here's a little about it: Spending the winter in Florida with a  group of rowdy horse trainers and performers ought to be fun for seventeen-year-old peddler O’Neill. But when he and his ailing guardian Scarff park their wagon with the Gaskins, things go downhill fast. Scarff is growing sicker by the day, and if that isn’t bad enough, O’Neill soon finds himself unwittingly engaged to the Gaskin king’s daughter—a dangerous girl who doesn’t care one fig that he’s already devoted to another. With Scarff in dire need of a rare swampland remedy, O’Neill plunges into the magic-tainted Floridian wilds with three goals in mind: to rescue the runaway Gaskin princess,

The Reader and the Writer

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My grandmother was a capital-r Reader. If there were prizes for book consumption, she could have contended for top honors. She was happiest, she always said, with a stack of books beside her chair. Sometimes she even read two at a time (shocking!). She was a homebody in her later years, and I was her main book supplier. Usually, I read the books I chose for her: Catherine Cookson, Maeve Binchy, and anything with a bit of nineteenth-century hardship and a splash of romance. None of the modern stuff appealed to her, but a tale in which a family had to share a single potato beside a fire about to flicker out in midwinter--now that floated her boat. She'd often say, "What's wrong with me that I like people starving and suffering in my stories?" And we'd laugh--because it was true. Sometimes she'd write little notes and tape them to the books before returning them: Very Good. Good. A little steamy! Loved, loved, loved! I still have some of these little scra

March Goings On & So Forth

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Is it spring yet? Winter can be pretty, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing freshly unfurled green leaves and golden daffodils and feeling warm sunbeams on my face instead of blasts of icy wind. But before spring actually arrives, something else will—and I’m so excited! Deep Magic E-zine’s Spring 2019 issue will be published March 12, and (squeal!!!) it features a short story from me. I’ve been thinking about writing a few side stories set in the world of The Mermaid’s Sister for a while now, but never did anything about it until super bestselling author and Deep Magic creator Jeff Wheeler asked me to write a TMS story for the digital magazine a couple months ago. I was thrilled to accept his kind offer—and terrified that I wouldn’t be able to write something quickly that was of a quality worthy of such a fantastic e-zine. But soon enough, ideas were churning in my brain about our dear old friend O’Neill and his guardian Scarff and what one of their winter trips sou