I’ve received lots of email lately this week from people who hope to write someday. Based on the two titles I’m about to recommend, I have some advice for everyone who’s written me this month about wanting to write someday. Here it is: do like these authors did and write the story that only you can write. Brilliant advice, huh? I estimate I’m the two-million-seven-hundred-thousand-sixty-fourth person to give this advice. (Give or take a few.) So you’ve probably heard it before. But it’s good advice. I read two great examples this week from writers who do just this: Maggie Stiefvater and Laura Elliot. I started reading Maggie the summer Shiver came out. I liked her writing, and I’ve been buying her books ever since. I want to recommend The Scorpio Races as an example of where a writer does what only Read more…

The Reckoning by M. Leighton, the second and final book in the Fahllen series, will be available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble on Monday, October 31st. Halloween day! Visit http://mleightonbooks.blogspot.com/2011/10/reckoning.html for excerpts and the latest on her new release! Book signing for Crushed by K.C. Blake this Saturday from noon to four at the Northpark Mall in Joplin, MO.! Read an excerpt here!  Join The Paranormal Plumes This Weekend Oct. 28-Oct. 30th in Savannah, GA IF YOU DARE! #paranormalplumessociety all weekend for virtual scares  The Noah sisters rule Titan High with their beauty, brains, and magical powers. Each year they play a secret game: Crushed. The girls pick their targets carefully and blow enchanted dust into the boy’s faces, charming them, but this year Kristen makes a grave mistake. She chooses the wrong boy and almost dies that same day. Coincidence? Maybe. But something isn’t quite right Read more…

Raise your hand if you’re a nerd. Of any variety. Maybe you’re a little too into ballet. Or Star Trek. Or you’re the only girl ever to like Halo. You think Middle Earth is a real place. You study obscure facts about World War II aircraft. You’ve read every work in the library’s biography section. Go on; raise your hand if you’re a nerd. I won’t laugh. As soon as I was old enough to scrawl my name across the back of a library card, I lived in libraries: the county library, stately with a cupola on top, the children’s section in a warm cozy basement; the school library, with large windows along one whole wall and ugly blue-gray carpeting that made your knees itch. Librarians became the fairy godmothers and fathers who provided me with riches beyond compare. I Read more…

Love in a Minor Key While my main characters wake me early in the morning and keep me tossing and turning at night, there are days when I find myself seduced by the charms of one of the minor characters inhabiting my personal universe. Like Sir Walter de Rochefort. Ah, Sir Walter, you relentless tease. Of all the characters in my Ripple series, he’s the most likely to tell me what he’s thinks of something. Anything. The dinner I cooked, (the dinner I didn’t cook), the danger in which I’ve placed a character, his opinion on American _________.  (You fill in the blank. He’s got plenty o’ opining when it comes toAmerica and Americans.) Whilst my other characters (major and minor) mostly skedaddle the moment I finish writing for the day, Sir Walter refuses. He hangs around unseen and unexpected Read more…