For the Criminally Inane

When Elias of Elderberry introduces his best friend Jaron Finley to his magical world of fairies and castles, wizards and yōkai shape-shifters, will Jaron ever want to go back to his dull world of school and homework, especially after meeting Elieli, the fairy princess of Estraelia? It’s doubtful, but he must—the mortal that he is. Will Elias have to alter his memory and erase all that his friend has seen, or will Jaron be able to keep the secret that Elias Rey—a sophomore at PVHS, is a wizard and the youngest heir of Elderberry? Held captive by evil wraiths in the dungeons of Sirusas, Elias’s older brother Saulen struggles with remembering who he is. How will the sons of Elderberry battle the dark forces of sorcery and rescue him? And finally, when Adalee trips and falls by a nest abandoned from a Swypht Dragon of Ural, she takes an egg, knowing it has little chance to survive on its own. How will she keep it hidden in t...

When I first started writing, I wrote short stories and scenes. When I decided to try my hand at writing a novel, I soon discovered that this was a different beast. And I mean beast! Now that I've tamed the beast (for a novel is a huge unruly thing), I can finally hone my skills, fine tune my writing, make my storytelling stand out and develop my style and voice. I've had some help along the way.  My top ten favorite books now are listed below and why I like them. My collection of books. In the order I bought them. 1. The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing . Writer's Digest 2nd edition. I used this book as a base for when I first started writing. It's a compilation of different writers on different subjects. It's a good first book for starting out to get an overview of how to write a novel. 2 . Fire in the Fiction: passion, purpose and techniques by Donald Maass. Writer's Digest Books. He talks about writing deep, passionately, purposefully. Make your bo...

Pitching in baseball is where the catcher and the pitcher try to outsmart the batter and either make him swing when he's not supposed to or  fake him out so he doesn't swing at a perfectly good pitch. That's not what we are talking about here. But it is similar. I am throwing a potential home run to a potential catcher...wait, I think the metaphor just fell apart. At any rate, I've got something, they might want to catch it. They call it pitching. We're talking about Industry Professionals: Agent and Editor pitches. Face to face. Just the story. Before going to the conference, I researched some pitch strategy because I really didn't know what the heck I was doing. The best one, I thought, said to build a relationship of trust first. We had five minutes to 1) introduce ourselves, 2) talk about our book 3) ask or answer questions 4) exchange information for further contact. There wasn't a lot of room for building trust. But I tried. So after my exper...

The whole story. Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be a writer. In fourth grade, I wrote mysteries and my friend illustrated them. They made no sense. The clues were contrived and there was always a cute boy. I wrote again in Middle school, in high school, took creative writing classes in college. About eight years ago, I decided to turn my dream into a reality by taking writing seriously and started writing about two thousand words every day. I read books, watched tutorials, and studied my craft. And I wrote. I wrote a lot of crap. But finally I felt like I had something worth sharing. Something I could put out there for the masses. So, back in February Rob bought me a writer's retreat on the beach for Valentine's Day. Four days on the beach, writing, agent critique, yoga and no kids. I know, romantic right? But that's what I wanted so it was. Can we just give it a collective, awwwww? It even came with a box of chocolates. However, in June, a month away from ...

Alton Brown and I are like besties. Sunday morning I saw it come across my Facebook feed that he was coming to town. And I knew I had to go. The kids and I came to know Alton Brown after binge watching FoodNetwork Star on the internet. (No cable here!) We thought him, funny, genuine and, I don’t know, unique. Authentic. So one thing I’ve learned from going to a few of these book signings at our local Indy bookshop (see previous posts) is that the faster you buy the book, the earlier you get in line for the signing, hence out of the bookstore and the less likely I am to find something I want to spend my money on. You see, you get a letter code at the time of purchase. Since it was Sunday and the event was Tuesday, and Alton Brown was popular, I knew we were in trouble. So I had a dilemma. Was buying something on the internet breaking the Sabbath? But if I didn’t buy it on Sunday, Monday would surely put me at an F or a G! I went round and round with my husband and guess wh...