A Herd of Turtles

To manage my new pace of releasing a novel every four months (thank you Dragonblade Publishing!!) I have to create a draft in two months. That pace requires that I write at least 2000 words a day (10,000 a week) for eight weeks. More or less. Those months are bracketed by a month of beta […]

Naming the Enslaved

Did you know that: Slave registers were kept for the former British Colonial Dependencies between 1813-1834 The practice began as a result of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. That law outlawed trafficking in enslaved people between Africa and British colonies but considered those already in place to be “lawfully enslaved.” […]

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 […]