“Meanwhile, back at the ranch,” was a cliché by the mid-twentieth century, and it probably was used for another fifty years previously, the heyday of the American Western. This phrase in the old movie serials switched focus from one scene to another. With Book 4, the Selkirk Family Ranch series…
Discussions about pen names versus real names keep coming up. I use my real name, not merely because it is unique in this country, but also because my name has a history in the comics biz. So why not let people who know me learn about my novels? I’ve used…
Writing Defiant Diva was a challenge–because the heroine of this romance novel is the villain of the previous book in the Singers in Love series. That’s right. The villain. How could I get into the head of a destructive opera star and make her sympathetic and believable? They say a…
Such is the love modern readers have for Jane Austen’s witty and romantic novels that many authors have dared to write alternate Jane Austen novels, novellas, short stories, and so on. In fact, there has been in recent years a large outpouring of fiction that attempts to satisfy the fantasy…
This news deserves an exclamation point because I wrote the first draft of Haunted Tenor in 2007, and here it is the end of 2017 and it is finally releasing. The backstory: My favorite opera is Verdi’s Don Carlo. The reason it’s my favorite might seem obvious: I’m an…
I found this fascinating. In Robert Tombs’ The English and Their History, I came across a line that actually caused me to think of Richard III in a new light. Hard to do, considering the dozens of histories and novels I have read that exhaustively discuss Richard III’s villainous (and…
In 2016, I wrote the first draft of Cowgirl Rescue and then found a lovely cover for it and bought it. That was in July. I didn’t know for sure what the title of the third Selkirk Family Ranch book would be, so I had the cover designer dummy up…
In my newest guest blog post talking about writing, I discuss writing series books. As you may know, I’ve been writing the Selkirk Family Ranch series for a while, and I’m currently finishing up Book 3. At the end of the post, I mention that I’m looking for opinions and…
Recently, I was tagged in yet another discussion in a private Facebook group about Marvel Comics original artwork. These discussions usually rehash what is known and what is imagined about the large body of Marvel original art drawn by Jack Kirby. They include what is publicly known about legal cases,…
I acquired, edited, and wrote stories for MyRomanceStory.com and most of the posts on its blog for a number of years. In addition, I wrote a series of articles under the heading of Writer’s Resources. Surprisingly, they still contain some useful advice for the would-be published author of romance. Writer’s…