My First Book Trailer – The Swinging Doors :)
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writer
Know thy Character- Scott
People always ask, “Where do you get your ideas” for stories and characters. The obvious (and overly simple) answer is from my life. A writer friend of mine said she once read that an author’s first published novel is usually the most autobiographical, but I don’t believe this to be true. After all, my …
The Swinging Doors – a dream finally realized
In the spring of 1993, I had a dream. I know it’s a bit cliché—all writers seem to dream their stories, but this is the truth. In this dream, I clearly saw a young girl around the age of 18 wearing nothing more than bloomers, a corset, and a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. …
Bring on the Bears
Many years ago, while I was a student at UNC-Wilmington, I had the good fortune of studying under a man named Stanley Colbert. He offered a piece of advice I have never been able to forget: “When telling the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears,’ bring on the bears.” Mr. Colbert had …
Sunday Mornings with the Phantom
Comic strips are magical. In fact, they are probably the most genius of all literary genres. Think about it—a story gets told in three or four panels. Panels, not paragraphs, not pages, and certainly not chapters. Even more amazing, cartoonists are able to evoke emotions with very few words or images. We laugh, …
Growing up D&D
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 …
Brainless Blog (aka Jellyfish-Brain)
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 …
Celebrating Mixed Tapes
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 …
Writer’s Block
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, …
Birthdays
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 …