This week, writer Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her upcoming February 2024 novel, THE SNOW FOREST, from publication. In a moving vlog post (I saw it on Instagram), she explained that, over the weekend, she had heard from many devastated readers in Ukraine who could not understand why she would publish a book set in Russia …Read More

    I hope my mother had friends who told her what a good mother she was. She and her sister were terribly close, and so I suspect she was my mother’s best listener. Not only was my mother also an excellent, empathetic listener, she was a prolific sharer. Once, when I flew in for …Read More

Are you ready to self-publish? There are too many sites to count that will tell you how to do it. I want to be straight with you about the risks–emotional and practical–of getting into self-publishing.

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning. At our house, we’ve added a half-serious, half-ridiculous line to the saying: Yellow sky, prepare to die. Pretty extreme, yes. It comes from my growing up in tornado-prone landscapes. The pre-tornado skies usually progressed from rainy, to cloudy and still, to yellow, and …Read More

  A Little Flutter for BLISS HOUSE– Read this part first, and today, okay?       For the past few days, BLISS HOUSE, the first book in my haunted house gothic series, has been free on Kindle. I’m over the moon that nearly 2000 new readers have downloaded it! Seriously, I’m ridiculously excited. CHARLOTTE’S …Read More

    It’s been so long since I’ve been in touch, I imagine that I should write you a letter like the ones people send at holidays: “And here we are in Santorini! Harald is no longer a guest of Her Majesty, so we kept the champagne flowing the entire trip. Doesn’t he look wonderful? …Read More

An aphorism that came to my mind today was, “Don’t sacrifice the good for the perfect.” I looked it up, and found that it’s a riff on a quote oft attributed to Voltaire (I haven’t even read Candide–bucket list perhaps). “The best is the enemy of the good,” is actually an Italian proverb. I honor …Read More