Ten Years and Still Learning

Last week was a little rough. Joyful, but rough I’ve been writing much of my life. I’ve been publishing for ten years. This year everything ratcheted up a notch. I recently read something from Virginia Heath. She said, “Being a professional writer, I always have a new story on the go and at least another […]

Release Week!

The Defiant Daughter remains 99 cents the first part of the week until it is released into the wild on Thursday. Early reviews have been really, really GOOD. I have scheduled four Facebook Group takeovers and two video interviews this week. I’ve had no time to plan a celebration, so I will probably just have […]

Rambling in Chester

Eli had legal business with the bishop. I stopped to enjoy the medieval cathedral. Its construction dates to the eleventh century, the sort of date that makes my American jaw drop. It was built by the Benedictines and survived the dissolution of the monastery by being promoted to cathedral in 1541. Goodness. It also survived […]

Moving Swiftly

In ten days The Defiant Daughter will go live. I had a note this morning from an advance reviewer who not only raved about the book, but told me I absolutely must write three more of them, for each of three gentlemen introduced in that book. I had already decided on two of them, now […]

An Arrow of Righteousness

My current focus is on The Forgotten Daughter. Deadlines loom—Yikes! This one begins with a shop clerk in Manchester on the brink of ruin. *** Frances Hancock—Fanny to those who cared—always knew she was a bastard. Her mother’s husband made sure of that. She didn’t know her father was an earl until her mother died. […]

Consanguinity

The list of those a man may not marry begins with Mother, Daughter, Father’s mother…Son’s daughter, etc. and continues down a long list that includes such unlikely situations as marriage to one’s Daughter’s son’s wife The entries pertinent to my research were:Father’s daughterMother’s daughter Why did it matter? The hero of The Forgotten Daughter is […]

Weary and Sad

The week dawns with your author weary and sad. The end of last week and the weekend brought several phone calls about friends and associates in health crises, some of them covid-related, and the unrelenting drum beat of bad news from California, Louisiana, Haiti, and Afghanistan. It is down right debilitating! But I managed to […]

Gigs and Pony Carts

…there were a variety of types of vehicles made to transport passengers in use in the Regency era. A carriage is a horse-drawn four wheeled vehicle; a coach is a variety of carriage with four corner posts and a fixed roof. Private carriages generally required 2-4 horses and were expensive to buy and maintain. Wealthy […]

WIP: Eli’s Troubles

A bit for WIP Wednesday. I made start on The Forgotten Daughter. A young woman in Manchester has discovered the identity of her natural father. Her siblings need help and she is determined to get it. Meanwhile, Eli Benson is feeling entirely too self satisfied. Two points of clarification. Earlier in the chapter Eli notes […]