Recently, Daddy was featured on the Raised on DnD podcast with Neil Cardarelli. A gamer for forty years, Daddy raised all three of us to play (my personal favorite was DragonQuest 😊), hosted a D&D club at school, and invented his own game, Skill Master, where players use a deck of cards instead of …
Having an imaginary friend is a rite of childhood. These friends can exist in whatever form, in whatever color, in whatever texture their creators devise. In the movie Inside Out, Riley’s imaginary pal is Bing Bong, a pink elephant made out of cotton candy with a cat’s tail and yellow and red striped legs. …
               I just completed the revisions for my next book, The Lost Guardian. It is now on its merry way to the publisher, and I get to relive the joys of jellyfish-brain. It is incredible how senseless one becomes after three weeks of intense rewrites and edits. It is not fun, and anyone who tells …
Growing up in the ‘80s, I celebrated the mixed tape. My family has always loved music, and my sister Kathy and I spent much of our allowances on cassette singles and albums by our favorite artists. The house rocked to the tunes of Billy Joel, Whitney Houston, Madonna, and John Cougar (Mellencamp). We boogied …
Everyone’s heard of writer’s block—that moment where a writer writes herself into a corner made of cement ten feet thick and a hundred feet tall, where there are no windows or doors, and no rope with which to pull oneself up and over the wall. The story stalls, the characters are left in limbo, …
               Eleven years ago, I gave birth twice. I became a mother in March and a published author in April. My first book, The Secret Keeper, became a reality almost one month after my son, Wesley, was born. Needless to say, it was a dizzying spring that year, 2009.                I had conceived the idea …
The greatest storytellers can inspire generations. I ought to know because I grew up with the best storyteller in the world—my dad. While most kids crave a song or two at bedtime, or perhaps having a book read to them, I always looked forward to the sun going down because it meant story time with …
Writing is a process. I am reminded of this every time I sit down in front of the computer…or every time someone asks me what it’s like to write a book. Recently I had a student ask me what she needed to do to write a book because she had an idea and …
Every child has a magical place that is all his own. For Lucy Pevensie, it was the wardrobe in Professor Diggory’s house. For Harry Potter, it was Diagon Alley, the doorway to the wizarding world. For my son, it’s the old tobacco barn in the field behind our house. For me, it …
Let’s eat Grandma! Let’s eat, Grandma! Yes, we’ve all seen this meme about the importance of the comma. Poor Grandma looks torn between running for the hills or serving up her famous chicken potpie with a smile. It’s funny and makes quite a few of us teachers laugh. But it also makes a point, and …