Blog
From this day forward
I attended a family wedding last week. As a romance writer, I find weddings particularly meaningful. After all, the happy ending I give my fictional characters is either a wedding, or the promise that the hero and heroine will work to build a life together.This...
Canadian repatriation: Month 1
It's been almost a month since we left the UK for Canada. A time of change and excitement, but puzzlement too as we adjust to a place which is, yet isn't familiar.It's bigAlthough Canada is a vast country in terms of geography, it's also big in other ways. From car...
My Romance Writers of America (RWA)® conference 2015, from A to Z
As some of you know, I was in New York City last week for the 35th RWA® conference. This annual event is the biggest gathering of romance writers in the world. As a first-time attendee and 2015 Golden Heart® finalist, it was an exciting, overwhelming and...
Moving away and moving toward
Migration has been a recurring theme in my life and family history.My mother's ancestors left Ireland in the nineteenth century to seek a better life in what was then the frontier of Canada's Ottawa Valley.Her lone Scottish ancestor, my great-great grandfather, left a...
“Viva la Dragonfly”
Before the Golden Heart® class of 2015 named itself the Dragonflies, I hadn't thought much about that particular insect. I hadn't had a positive experience with dragonflies, but I hadn't had a negative one either. Dragonflies were simply peripheral to my life.Much has...
Celebrating heroes (and dads)
Sometimes it seems anti-heroes are everywhere.Many are in our workplaces, as the recent #DistractinglySexy Twitter campaign in response to sexism in science illustrates.Anti-heroes also appear on public transport. Like the man in a suit and carrying a laptop bag who,...
Hope…in life and writing
I've thought a lot lately about my mission as a writer. What do I want readers to take away from my work? To answer that question, I keep coming back to the angel teddy bear perched on the bookshelf beside my writing desk.The bear was a gift I gave myself many years...
Ten things I wish I’d known about the writing life
A friend working on her first fiction manuscript emailed me this week to ask if I had "any words of wisdom" to share. I answered her privately, but her questions made me think about the things I wish I’d known when I started writing in pursuit of publication.Find your...
Finding goodness
As regular readers of this blog know, goodness is my word for 2015. My last post focused on a bend in the road, and how hard it was to find goodness in a difficult life situation.The response to that post overwhelmed me and, just when I thought goodness was scarce, I...
Photo by Robin Spencer, Spencer Studio