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…

FINDING THE GEMS: A Tribute to Markus Zusak She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips.  He tasted dusty and sweet.  He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit collection.    –Markus Zusak, The Book Thief If you have read and loved Zusak’s book, you may have come across his description of his writing: “I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it.” When I first read this, I immediately thought, “Yes!” I knew I wanted to try to do that same thing: to make sure there was one sparkling bit of language on each page that would make a reader sigh or smile or cry or remember when. Read more…

Snape is my new crush. There. I said it out loud. Well, I put it in writing anyway. Like many readers, I feel an intense connection to Severus Snape every time I read through the second half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I just wasn’t prepared for the effect that his story would have on me when presented on a really, really big screen. I wasn’t one of those who made it for the midnight viewings. I’d promised my niece that we would watch it together. (We’re both very bookish and deeply devoted to all things JK Rowling.) After I made the promise, it was a bit hard to keep, as she wouldn’t be coming to visit ‘til July 18th, and the rest of the family were too sick to go until the 20th. But this past Wednesday, Read more…

It took two fifteen-year-old boys to convince me to follow my heart and start writing full time. Fifteen’s this great age. You’ve survived the battle arena of middle school and probably made it through your first year of high school. And in some part of you that maybe doesn’t hover on the surface, you know—absolutely know—that you can do something great. Something amazing. Something only you can do. Yeah, maybe a person or circumstance in your life has shoved that knowledge down to the deep end of the pool and tied it there with a big rock, but you still know it’s there, it’s true, and it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks because you know it. Look around at the adults in your life: how many of them still know this, carry it around in their pockets? One? Read more…

I am frequently asked why I chose to publish Rippler independently.  The short answer is that I couldn’t resist. Imagine for a moment that you lived in the age during which electric light was being installed. You don’t have electricity.  Some of your neighbors have had that new-fangled gas-lighting installed, but they admit it was a bother and that it smells bad, and honestly, you’ve always been fine with candles and a kerosene lamp or two yourself. Now imagine that you are off to the big city where you will stay in a hotel.  Your room is supplied with candles and electric lighting.  You try it out, and suddenly you see the appeal.  Electric light is bright and unwavering.  You consider how convenient it is; there’s no wick to trim, no running out of wax, and considerably less fire hazard. Read more…

I accomplished a huge life-goal over Memorial Day Weekend.  Since I was seven, I have wanted to write a book.  That goal morphed into “I want to write a book people will buy” as the years went on. Rippler (the book formerly known as “Ripple”) went live on Amazon this weekend and, shock of shocks, people bought it.  People not related to me.  (I would know this because I had more than the two sales I coerced family members into making!)  I spent my birthday (on traditional Mem. Day) pulling weeds and laying compost in the yard, and all day I had this happy flutter in my belly. I did it!  I really did it! My seven-year-old self just grinned and grinned. Book One in the Ripple Series 2.99 at Amazon

I went to sunny, hot Florida for ten days to escape wet, cold Oregon.  There were quite a few things I didn’t miss. I didn’t miss the rain. I didn’t miss the sub-80-degree weather.  (80 is God’s perfect temperature; just sayin’.) Didn’t miss the cats me-yowling for breakfast. Okay.  Maybe just a teeny.  Gosh, I did kind of miss the cats, I guess.  Maybe I should list the things I missed, now that I am PATENTLY no longer on vacay. So . . . Um . . . There has to be something . . . Jeeves!  I missed my butler-alarm-clock.  Seriously, if you haven’t been woken up by the mellifluous voice of Stephen Fry as your own personal butler (Excuse me, madam, but the Washington Post rang, again . . .), then you have not lived.  I’m sure you Read more…

Editor Cheryl Kline challenged writers of children’s literature to post or at least ponder their guiding lights for writing (on her non-eponymous blog, chavelaque.blogspot.com).  I love a challenge, so here goes! My Advice to Me, Myself and I Write because you must. When I was younger, an actor/director told me there was only one excuse for being in theatre: because you’d be miserable doing anything else.   Let your characters say what they need to say, how they need to say it. One of my most recently-met characters insisted on reporting (past) conversations in “scripted” form instead of as bits of quotation-marked dialog.  I let her have her way in this one area, and it must have really given her some confidence, because she’s the biggest bossy-pants I’ve ever written.  If I’d insisted upon quotation marks, I might never have Read more…

Ah, William.  You heart-breaker.  You shameless flirt.  You had me at “the quality of mercy is not strained.”  I mean, how’s a seven-year-old supposed to resist language like that?  And here’s the thing: no one saw it coming.  Mom and Dad figured I wouldn’t notice you, probably counted on our age difference as something that would steer me clear of you–maybe even send me down for a nap. But no. From the first moment, from, “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,” I was yours heart and soul.  From there it was but a short step to, “for you, I would be trebled twenty times myself.”  Ah, me, Will Shakespeare.  You captured my affections before I knew I had any to bestow. Did you know I tried to give my daughter your birthday?  And when she insisted Read more…