I love fish-out-of-water stories. Lately I’ve been musing on my own growing-up years, and I think I had a little break-through as to why I love that kind of story.  My dad spoke fluent Spanish and often talked to me about the Cuba of his childhood. When I would visit my grandmother and grandfather, I was guaranteed that, at some point, the talk would circle back to Cuba. How much they missed Habana, guayaba, lechon. How much they would give to be able to visit. (This was the 70s. Visiting Cuba was not happening.)    I loved their stories, and I loved when Grandmommie called my granddad “Papi,” or when she got out the Cuban school books for me to read, or when she taught me what the words meant, or prepared plátanos using crushed Saltine crackers (probably tortitos de plátano, but Read more…

I speak Elizabethan. Okay, imperfectly, and not as a regular thing, and probably it would be more accurate to say that I understand Elizabethan English. So how did this happen? Was it gained through hours and hours of graduate-level work, resulting in an obscure degree? Nope. (Although I do have a VERY obscure advanced degree, and some day I can tell you all about it.) I learned to understand the English of Shakespeare as a kid, in the way kids learn any language: by being immersed in it. My dad was a high school English teacher who wanted to become better educated in his Shakespeare. Thus, when I was a baby, he and my mom began an every-summer habit of taking the fam to Ashland, Oregon to watch plays. (Or, as the Elizabethans would have said, to “hear” plays.) For Read more…

  While I was at sea for my writing cruise, I reflected an awful lot on questions. The more I thought about it, the more I came to see that, as an author my job is all about moving a character, in a compelling way, from asking the wrong questions to asking the right questions. Let’s look at an example. I’ll use my SAVING MARS series. That series has so many characters with whom I can contrast Jessamyn, my main character. We can take a quick look at three of the “contrast characters”: Harpreet, Ethan, and Kipper. Harpreet doesn’t have much of a growth arc, because when we meet her, she’s already done the hard work of becoming who she was capable of becoming. She has, in essence, learned what the guiding question is for her life.  She faces her circumstances Read more…

Three days without a phone? What? Seriously? Is that even possible in the modern world? I’ll tell you how it went…. But first I should probably explain how I came to be cell phone-less in the first place. It would make me sound very cool if I said this was some sort of planned connectivity fasting period. It was not. I most definitely did not plan to have my phone fall out of – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Three weeks ago, I rose very early in the morning to drive with Dr. Science up to Portland to catch a flight. We had a lovely empty-freeway drive and arrived in plenty of time for me to check my bags. And that was where the trouble started. It’s been awhile since I posted a pic of how I normally travel, but let’s just say that I Read more…

I was asked a question about my writing process last month, and it got me thinking. (“A dangerous prospect; I know.”) Here was the question: how many revisions are normal for me when I’m working on a novel? The answer is: a lot. More than one or two. Or three. Or four. I am absolutely not one of those writers who can pound it out and get it right the first time. Nor am I one of those who can, by going at a snail’s pace, say what I want to say the first time I make the attempt. Fortunately, I actually like revision. Mostly. For me, the steps go like this: 1) First draft: pretty much what it sounds like. This is where I get the bare bones of the story down. 2) Read the first draft (after stepping away for a week-ish) and Read more…

I’m back from my all-too-quick visit to the UK last month. I re-visited Cornwall and Stratford-upon-Avon, doing a little research along the way! Here are the highlights:   Things look really good in pictures. I would LOVE to live my life there, in all those great moments. Look! Shakespeare’s schoolroom! Look! School boys walking there because it is STILL a school, and how cool is that? Look! Wildflowers! Timber-frame buildings! The ocean! My trip wasn’t solid goodness, actually. I neglected to snap pictures of me, pulled off the motorway when the oil light on my rental car lit up 30 minutes after I hired it. No screen shots of my purchased phone minutes vanishing while I waited on hold for the car hire agency to take my call. And definitely no pictures of me sobbing when they said it might take two hours for help Read more…

Like most writerly types, I am wordy. Verbose. When two words will suffice, I am likely to use twenty-six. Or two hundred. Or two thousand. (See what I did there?) (And here?) I have a way of tidying up these (unnecessary) words that I’ve never heard anyone else suggest, and I want to share it. Though I always try to remove the deadweight during one of the final revisions, I will often find myself with a larger word count than is ideal. Here’s how I tackle it: by deciding what final word count would make me happy, and evenly removing the words from each page. That means that if I have an 85,000 word manuscript, and I want to get it down to 78,000, I will need to remove 7,000 words. If I have 365 pages, then I need to Read more…

I’m writing this down in hopes it will inspire anyone needing that push to keep trying for success on a difficult task/project/dream. If you’ve seen the video about making The Wedding Gown for the daughterling, then you know I met the deadline and gave my daughter a gown that was absolutely perfect for her. It wasn’t a huge challenge, because I have the background in pattern-making and costume design. I started patterning in December and slowly worked my way through sourcing fabric, perfecting the fit of the pattern in a “muslin” (fake fabric), buying and cutting the real fabric, sewing the gown, cutting up the lace embellishment, mosaic-ing the lace pieces to fit onto her bodice, embroidering crystal beads and pearls onto the lace, and attaching the lace to the gown. I would do about an hour’s worth of lace Read more…

For about fifteen years I was airplane phobic. I worked on this fear in several ways because it was important to me our kids could visit their grandparents, who lived 3,000 miles away. Eventually I got past my fears, in part by imagining my flights as “fun,” gradually transferring my love of Star Wars-style space flight to my own flights. Happily, in all those years of flying to grandma’s once or twice a year, we never experienced anything worse than lost luggage. Skip forward to 2012. I now love flying. I’m still able to recall my fears, and occasionally they rear their ugly hydra heads, but mostly I love it. I write my MARS SERIES, about a girl who loves to pilot. Skip ahead to 2015: I’m ready to fully remember and inhabit my old fears, and I start writing Read more…

First off, writing time travel fiction involves research. Lots of research. Books. Internet. Museums. Rinse and repeat. All those activities informed my writing of Edmund and his world in A Thief in Time. But in another way, writing Edmund was a job I began preparing for when I was just seven. That was the year I saw my first two Elizabethan-era dramas onstage. I don’t remember which I saw first—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or The Merchant of Venice—but I was at that golden age of language acquisition, and I soaked up the thees and thous and cansts and wherefores just like they were any other new-to-me words uttered by adults addressing other adults. I was smitten by the rhythm and sound of all those delicious words, chewing them like Halloween candy long after the weekend of play-going was over. At Read more…