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  • The Highs and Lows of Being an Author – a guest post by Helen Hollick

    The Highs and Lows of Being an Author – a guest post by Helen Hollick

    It’s a pleasure to welcome Helen Hollick to my blog today. We first met in Denver, Colorado, at the 2015 Historical Novel Society conference. Helen has been a huge supporter of indie authors…

  • Excerpt from For King and Country

    Henry tried to shut out Marian and Robin’s voices as he and Stephan left. The wooden stairs creaked beneath their feet. At the landing, Henry heard Hugh settling his father for the night. Edward’s muffled laugh sounded, familiar and comforting, reminiscent of days long past. Candlelight flickered beneath Bea’s door. She was singing softly, a…

  • L.Q. revisited…

    I read about as slowly as I write. There was a time I could devour a novel  in 3-4 days. Wish I had those kind of days now.  But come to think of it, I wasn’t writing when I read at that pace. So why does this post include a picture my son took at…

  • trim it, cut it, lather, rinse, repeat…

    No, I didn’t get a haircut. I’m attempting to revise the 1st draft of my novel. Reading JW Manus, I’m probably not doing as much as I should to get into the joy of cutting. I must say, however, that I particularly enjoyed reading one of her descriptions of Explainery: “A trees grows and the…

  • I will not be one of those writers…

    “I get very confused when a writer with a few hundred friends on Facebook and Twitter thinks that repeating the publication of their book over and over and over and over will make them more than a handful of sales. And fewer friends.” —Dean Wesley Smith Words to remember. Okay…I am months away from placing…

  • the end is just the beginning…

    The last ~4,000 words of my novel were well received at writers group last week. Satisfying, passionate, touching, emotional. Tied up all the loose ends. YES! I don’t want you to think my writer friends just say glowing things because if all they did was squee then I wouldn’t grow as a writer. (Please, if…

  • who is this kate person?

    Oh come on. Admit it! Did you ever want to be someone else? Or want to have a different name? I know I did. As a kid, I didn’t really care for my given name. It was…different. My friends had ‘normal’ names like Mary, Nancy, Susan, Debbie, Karen. I was Charlene. You can’t exactly tell…

  • Let’s get started…

    Haven’t even published the novel yet and here I am starting a blog specific to my adventures in fiction. I guess I’d started thinking about this as I crept toward the climax of my novel. That may have been about the time WordPress suggested I should buy the domain that I’d used for blogging since…