The first rule that I greatly believe in when I am writing is that you must let bad things happen to your characters, especially the protagonist.

Did you just start hyperventilating? Do you think I’m a cruel writer?

Take a slow, deep breath. I know how much you love your characters. They are a part of you. You ripped them from your subconscious, from the greater parts of your being. You…

In some ways – though the sun is shining, my family are happy, and life is generally good – I’m not having a great week. The reason for this is that I am close to finishing my latest novel and I have reached the point in the plot where I have to kill off my main man, Edward. And I’m struggling because I have really grown to love 'my' Edward.  Know what I mean?

I have lived with Edward in my head for two years now. I know I have to kill him off for the sake of my…

Black ink stains the side of your hand and leaves smudges along the paper you are filling with your creative genius. You have leaped over the hurdles of writing chapters one and two, accomplished the beginning of your story, and now you are working on chapters three and four.

 …

We don’t just read books for the plots, but for the characters. We are following their lives, listening to their conversations, and even intruding on their most intimate moments. We befriend them and sympathize with what they are going through. Sometimes we laugh at them or we cry with them. Every now and then, we even fear for them. That is why you must treat the characters in your novel as though they are real people in your life. (If they live in your head, they…

A book is a work of fiction. You can make the unimaginable happen and you can let your characters do the unthinkable.

If you are writing a fantasy or supernatural story, by all means let your…

Starting a novel is the fun part.

All you have to do is decide what your characters want, and the challenges they need to overcome to get it. The plot, in other words.

Then keep playing until it sounds real. Make the story and the voice so true that when you’re writing, you’re not being ‘creative’, you’re just reporting things that really happened to people you know inside and out, in the most compelling, interesting and charming way possible. You want people to read one…

I've been working on a Tudor-era historical mystery for over a month now, and it's the fourth in a series. At first it went well, and I thought I had a viable rough draft almost finished.

Then the wheels fell off. Reading what I had done, I found that my secondary character was exactly like the main character, only younger. There was no mystery for either of them to solve. And the dynamics between characters is either messy or missing.

It was time to start over.

Since…

For much of my life I’ve avoided old ladies. Not that I didn’t like them.  Mostly, they just didn’t interest me much.  A few of these almost invisible, women come to mind

            My grandma Anderl, a pudding of a woman who lived with my family for several of the last years of her life, her daily glass of bourbon, doctor-prescribed, she insisted. 

            Mrs. Kauffman, the housemother in my college sorority with her precise lacquered hair and manicured nails…

I’m thinking that folks writing books in this flowing stream-of-consciousness manner are either would-be, envious, behind-the-times  Joycists  or angry  anti-Strunkists revolting against every red-inked correction they ever received from instructors whose job was to make their writing readable.

But, then, I’m an old lady, taught the conventional punctuation of the early 1900’s by Teacher Kuhnau, who was born in Germany and understood that rules are…

Many times I'm asked where I get ideas for my western historical romances.  It's simple, really. In fact I have enough stuff scribbled down to write these books for another twenty years or so. I prefer to write about the 1860s through the 1880s, though that's not a set rule. Each time I go on a trip through that era in my research the most fascinating thing happens. Characters begin to appear and talk to me. Tell me what it's like to live in the time and place I've stepped into. They speak…

It is never too late to become what you might have been.

I’m getting acquainted with the woman who has made an appearance on my computer.  She’s a bit like me, only bitchier, at least at the beginning of the book. Not her fault.  She’s been married to a bully of a husband for forty years and for some reason, she’s hung in there. Not my problem, but I can identify. 

One morning she wakes up next to him and discovers…

I finished and won with around 65K in my word count.  There were good days with high word counts and words pouring out of me like skittle rainbows.  There were bad days with blurred vision, arm cramps, and my brain on the fritz.

In the end, I finished and I am happy with what I accomplished - but I'm not done.

My story is was not wrapped up.  I am still revising it.  I am still on my writing grind.  But I feel I am in a better place.  I now have a writing…

As the quest for 50K comes to an end, the big question is:  “Are you a winner?” 

Technically, I could have validated my novel days ago.  I actually hit 60K this weekend but my novel is far from finished.  Sure, I started this revision journey thinking, I would be this awesome chick that revised her novel in 30 days but that’s not going to happen.

I’m okay with this.  I predict that I will probably finish a week into December, but then again maybe I will not.  I am so enamored…

As you work through your writing projects, do you find yourself interjecting your own experiences or emotions into your story and characters? I'm guessing it's unavoidable at some level, no matter your genre.

My WIP, which is currently under reconstruction, is about a woman, Piper Flemming, in her 40s, whose marriage has…

When was the last time you cried or laughed aloud while reading a book? Do you remember why the story affected you so? Let's discuss what it takes as a writer to create fiction that will make our readers laugh or cry.

Is it the story? The answer to that is yes and no, for a story alone has no power to make the reader's emotions erupt. Yet a bad story can ruin everything. Most importantly, for emotions to come to the surface, the reader has to have people to care about. Real…

I'm going to come right out and admit it.  I haven't been writing as much as I should in the last few weeks.

Here are my excuses:

1.  I've been working A LOT with church, youth group stuff, and volunteering at the girls' school.  It's kept me busy.

2.  I've not been feeling well.  Time to get the thyroid checked.  I've been sluggish and sleepy.

3.  And, this is the biggest excuse/reason: my characters are mutinying. …

Back at the coffee shop with the daughters this afternoon....waiting too late and didn't get any of the special pesto pasta :-(.  Oh well, the chicken salad sandwich and  peanut butter cookies were delicious, and the latte, of course, was its usual fantasmic!

It's Friday.  I did a smidgen of writing today and plan to do more as the girls play and goof off for the rest of the afternoon.

I finally wrote a scene that I had been having a hard time getting into my head - for a month…

I am home with a sick little girl today.  She caught her daddy’s wretched stomach virus.  My hands are positively chafed from the extremely frequent hand-washings.  I hope that the preventive measures work and I don’t get what they have.

Whenever I can’t find inspiration inwardly in my writing, all I really have to do is look at and engage in the world around me and write it…

...the epic fantasy series: Hidden Earth Volume 1 Maycly Parts 1-2-and 3 is scheduled for release on February 26 - and to top it off, that's my birthday! Best present I ever got.

Here's how it happened:

When people ask me if everything I do is epic, the answer is simple. . .yes!

I must confess that I went against the flow during this entire project, and now I'm happy to see that…

Most evenings these days my creative director husband and I have book-related conversations.  Topics like, Why do I feel Like a Loser?  What Should I Do Next? and the like are common.  But last night we took a step away from all of that and just had some fun with it - and now, my heroine Katie Cranford has her very own twitter (@katiecranford) and email!

Is it a jinx to believe that one day gaggles of girls will follow Katie?  Is it egotistical to contemplate what she'd have…