Posts Categorized: Writing life

My mom once asked me, “How do you know when a book is finished?” My answer: “When the voices in my head stop talking.” This is how I know it’s time to start a new book, too. The voices—characters, narrative, random bits of dialogue—start talking in my head, as though someone is rolling along the…

For some years now, I’ve been scattered all over the Internet. My steampunk self and books were on a very pretty site in one location, my plain self and Amish women’s fiction were at another location, and my romances and young adult novels were somewhere else. The paranormal ones gave it up entirely and vanished into…

Yesterday, fellow author Jennifer Skully and I met on the Apple campus to beta test some authoring software for the smart folks @iBooks. Neither of us knew what to expect … but we both came away madly excited! Those of you who use iThings probably know about iBooks Author, a nifty product that allows you…

I hope everyone survived the holidays and you’re sufficiently recovered from New Year’s Eve revels … I find that nothing closes out the year better than dinner with friends and a rollicking polka, don’t you agree? As of this writing, and a mere week after release, A Lady of Integrity is sitting at #2 on…

Here in what Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler refer to as the “shadow industry” of self-publishing (I feel so clandestine!), trends come and go. Free books, 99-cent bundles, funnels—you name it, someone has a marketing strategy for it. Me, I dabble in some things (like the 99-cent bundle of six romantic mystery novels I’m in…