I am doing a crazy thing, participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year. But I realized enough was enough, and I wasn’t going to sit on this idea for another minute. Twelve years has already been entirely too long. The first few days were brilliant. I loved some of what I wrote. In …
Category: Writing
Junior High
To celebrate Halloween, here's a little short story I wrote a few years ago for the writers' group I was in, inspired by an All Hallows' incident from my childhood. Hope you like it! Mom said I had to wear a winter coat and long johns with my costume. It wasn’t the first time. I’d …
Dream a Little Dream
Do you have dreams? Not middle-of-the-night visions, but goals for your life? If you’re reading this, you probably know that my biggest goal is to be a traditionally published historical novelist. There’s a lot that I can do to make this dream come true. I can write; obviously, I won’t be published if I don’t …
Truth in Art
I'ma talk Hamilton for just a millisecond. Across the front of my monitor stand at work, I have a line of rainbow-colored sticky notes on which I’ve penned, in some very basic hand-lettering styles, eight quotes from the play. I love the story that Hamilton tells, even amongst the historical liberties that Lin-Manuel Miranda (admittedly) …
The End of the Quest
I have a confession to make. I’m not really an art person. But in the summer of 1998, while vacationing with most of our extended family on my dad’s side, I saw a print of a 1921 painting, and I fell in love. We were at a shop somewhere in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, browsing and …
From Writing…to Sending
I’m getting really close to finishing. Tomorrow marks 21 months since I sat down and wrote the first words of my novel, and it is almost ready for agent queries. I have 59 agents on my list, and crafting a unique letter for each one of them feels almost as daunting as writing the novel …
Born with Magic
At our house, we go big with sunscreen. For the kids, we use a mineral-based brand. It turns their skin just a little bit white, and they look like little ghost children playing in the pool or on the beach. But I’ll be loyal to this particular brand forever because in 2017, we went to …
Welcome to Downton
Would you believe that just a week or so ago, I finished watching Downton Abbey for the first time? It always seemed strange to my friends and relatives that, being the historical fiction lover that I am, I had not seen a single minute of the series. I lost count of the number of people …
Stitching Together a Book
When I was in college, my mom and my aunt took up the hobby of quilting. More specifically, they did strip quilting, which is basically making quilts via assembly line. I decided I wanted on that bandwagon, too, so I asked them to teach me. Both of their moms also quilted, so we had some …
Lia Mack and Waiting for Paint to Dry
I am lucky enough to have a family member in the writing business! Here, my cousin Lia Mack shares a little about how she became a writer and what it meant to her to write her first novel. When did you take up writing as a hobby? Hobby? Them's fightin' words, ya know! Joking aside, I …
