"If the Beast gave me a library like he gave to Belle, I'd marry him too." -- Aya Ling

So, my wife's bosses were going through storage units, and had to sort through all the books their daughter collected over the years. Some were damaged, but they offered to give Emily and me most of the rest. Their daughter, they said, read a lot.

Not long ( Read more... )

Some novels dive right into the action; some try to get you interested in the characters and their world first; and the best ones try to accomplish both right from the get-go.

Scavenger Hunt, by Dani Lamia, is a slow burn, so slow I was convinced I was reading a literary novel at first. (Literary novel definition: No plot, no fun, and everyone ( Read more... )

See that little play on words I did with the title? No? Never mind.

I finished the final polishing of We Love Trouble. It tops out at 81,000 words--still the longest novel I've written yet. Boy, is writing a mystery tough: characters, suspects, clues, red herrings, ghosts, horses, Bigfoot ...

Well, it's that kind of story.

I already have Beowulf: ( Read more... )

It took almost exactly seven months to write the rough draft of We Love Trouble, which totals just over 80,000 words. That's writing part time, of course--plus I took a break to get More Slightly Off the Mark ready for publishing as an e-book. (The print version just came out--you'll be hearing about it.)

Not bad. It's about 15,000 words longer ( Read more... )

Here's the interesting history of the "Riviera of the Middle West":

https://ndsmcobserver.com/2020/02/indiana-beach-gone/For several years I got Indiana Beach tickets through my work, and would take my kids, and sometimes their friends, there. Later Emily and I went, once taking the grandkids. Like the local drive-in theater I've talked about ( Read more... )

I've been kidding myself with the name of one of my novel manuscripts. It's not that I was in love with the title: I was more in love with the possibilities the title represented.

Many readers are familiar with book series that have a progression in their titles. One For the Money, for instance, is followed by--well, what are the Stephanie Plum ( Read more... )

I've already worked into my novel-in-progress three atrocious puns, three references to The Wizard of Oz, two more to Harry Potter, two horses, and ... well, just one dog, but he's an unusually smart dog.

And it just hit 70,000 words, making "We Love Trouble" my longest rough draft ever.

There's also a line of dialogue that makes me giggle every time ( Read more... )

I hit 50,000 words in my latest novel rough draft!

I need to get that thing done, so I can let it cool while I work on my non-fiction project. I'd have them both done by now, if not for all those bills and, on a related note, that pesky full-time job.

But my hands have healed up from the sewer line fiasco, so at least typing isn't painful anymore.

( Read more... )