Author’s Blog

Humming Along

It was a busy weekend here in the urban wilds of eastern Pennsylvania. Bright sunshine alternated with sheets of rain and flooded streets. We planted some small maple trees. They are rescues from previous years’ weeding that survived life in pots long enough to be planted. Brunch with the Belles’ on Saturday got into Why […]

Hitchhiking Cross-Country 1971

Highlighting the facts behind Historical Fiction with Nancy Thorne and her young adult novel, The Somewhere I See You Again. Generally in this spot we include bits of research behind a novel. Nancy began this work expecting to look at the lives of young people fifty years ago, and things she learned hitchhiking in the […]

Alone in a Crowd: an Excerpt

The Defiant Daughter, the second of the Ashmead Heirs, has gone to beta readers. Here is a bit from early on. Lady Madelyn has been lured to London by invitations from her brothers and a plea from her stepson. She thought she preferred her solitude. She is beginning to realize she does not. ***** The […]

One Tough Lady

Did you know that Lou Henry was the first woman to graduate from Stanford with a degree in geology? It was the late 1890s. A degree was one thing. A job was another. She married a classmate who’d been offered a job as a mining engineer and went with him to China. She learned Mandarin […]

Another Year Older

On Friday The Defiant Daughter, lightly rewritten went to beta readers. Saturday dawned wet and very cold, and I lacked motivation to plunge into writing The Forgotten Daughter (though the first two scenes are in my head) nor to continue working on The Value of Pity. Early in the day, however, my daughter pointed me […]