As I announced last week to subscribers to my newsletter, Forever Mine is now available—just in time for Valentine’s Day! If you have a Valentine who likes to read love stories, family sagas, or American history, I encourage you to send them a copy. You can find Forever Mine at […]
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Six Years of Blogging: A Measure of Time and an Assessment of Life
I launched my blog “Story & History: One writer’s journey through life and time” in January 2012, publishing only three short posts that month. It took awhile to find my rhythm (stepped up to publishing twice a week) and my voice. For five years, I published on WordPress.com, and last […]
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Thoughts on Writing, from Before I Started Writing
I recently reread my journal from December 2002, trying to find the exact dates we’d traveled to Aruba that month. I came across an entry about writing. In 2002, writing was still a pipe dream of mine. I thought I wanted to write when I retired, but I hadn’t made […]
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The Power & Limits of Scrivener (for me)
As I try to polish and publish my third historical novel over the next couple of months, I thought it would be worthwhile to step back and take a look at the tools I’ve used in writing this draft, particularly Scrivener. I’m surprised that I haven’t written about Scrivener in […]
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Impact of Shorter Attention Spans on Readers and Writers
Twice in one day last week, I encountered references to people’s reduced ability to focus these days. Our shorter attention spans are due largely to the ever-present distractions from technology—and I know this is true, based on my own behavior. The first time this issue surfaced was during the Association […]
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On THE ARTIST’S WAY and the Truth in Fiction
I’ve mentioned before that I attended a diversity program called “Women Supporting Women” in late September 2005. When I declared to the other participants in that program, “I will write a book before I die,” one of the women in the group handed me a Post-It note. On that Post-It, […]
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Help Me With My Next Book Cover—Take the Poll
I’m hard at work editing my next historical novel, titled Forever Mine: Love Along the Oregon Trail. And I’m starting to think about the cover image for the book. Here are five possible covers. Which do you like best? Click on this link to vote for the cover you like […]
Continue readingI Have Another Guest Post on “A Writer of History”
M.K. Tod offered me another opportunity last week to have a guest post on her blog, A Writer of History. I wrote about the lessons I’ve learned in the last ten years on writing a novel. These were the lessons I presented during my session at the Arrow Rock Writing […]
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Postage Costs in the 1840s
I wrote a post last year about the difficulties of mail service during the California Gold Rush years. I was thinking about this issue again recently when I bought first-class stamps at our local Post Office. I typically wait until I’m almost out of stamps (which I was last week), […]
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Lessons from My First Writing Conference
I started my life as a writer in early 2007, so I’ve now been trying to develop my skills at writing fiction and creative nonfiction for a little more than a decade. I recently pulled out my journal volume from ten years ago, wanting to get a sense of how […]
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