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Aug 25, 2020

Most readers have a good idea that historical fiction requires heaps and heaps of research. It's obvious that you have to find out what happened when and similar details, but what other sorts of things do authors uncover, and do those things ever spark new ideas?

Cultural norms, seemingly unrelated historical facts, and...


Aug 18, 2020

This week is the final episode in our three-part series on classic retellings, continuing stories, and mashups with Sandy Barela from Celebrate Lit Publishing. Before we get to the brainstorming session (the last part of a nearly two-hour recording that I broke up),  I gave a short, mini-gush about one of the books we...


Aug 11, 2020

So, we were supposed to be going over the final story mashups and retellings with Sandy Barela, but then something happened today that changed all that.

For the past four weeks, I've been putting my bestselling series, Past Forward, free.  This serial novel comprises six volumes and over half a million words. Well,...


Aug 4, 2020

What's Better Than a Great Novel? How about THIS?

A novel written in verse. Yeah, I dreaded it. What if I didn’t like it? What if it was—oh, Lord, please no—in free verse. What if it wasn’t and it read like a children’s rhyming book until I wanted to tear out my hair? What if…

The world is full of what-ifs,...