Did anybody ever carve your initials plus other initials in a heart on a tree? Or perhaps you did the carving. Maybe that’s an old fashioned way of being romantic that has gone by the wayside as maybe it should for the health of our trees. 🙂 Mother Nature carved the heart in this tree. I spotted it a few …
How many ways can you give away books? I’m not sure, but I must be trying to find out today! With the release date for my new Hidden Springs Mystery, Murder Is No Accident, rapidly approaching, the publishers and I are trying to get people to visit Hidden Springs. That’s my little town with a good compliment of quirky small …
For an author, there’s nothing quite like holding in your hand that book that you’ve spent many long hours writing. You started with a shimmer of an idea. You added characters. You built a setting. You entangled your characters into all sorts of situations. Maybe some fun ones. Or romantic ones, or even dangerous ones for a mystery like Murder …
I’m guessing that hardly any of you can remember when you didn’t have electricity. I don’t. There have been those times when we have had power outages for one reason or another. Two times in the last few years we lost electricity for a week due to ice storms. In the terrible ice storm in 2009, light poles fell like …
Did you watch the Super Bowl? While basketball is my favorite sport to watch, I sometimes like football too, especially the Super Bowl. Even if you don’t like football, you’re supposed to like the commercials. Can you believe that one 30 second commercial cost 5 million dollars? Well, a million dollars is way past my imagination, but I suppose those …
Quilts connect the past with the present and the future. Since I let Wednesday slip by without thinking about it being Wednesday, I came up a post short on One Writer’s Journal this week. That happens sometimes when I’m trying to dig a new story out of my head and working toward a deadline. So I went into my blog …
February 1, 1966 Jocie Brook here reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. I’ll have to keep Dad from seeing that headline. He would sit me down and give me a long talk about hating any day. He’d tell me that every day was a gift from the Lord and one to be glad to face. He would say he learned how precious …
“Oh, the places you’ll go.” Dr. Seuss might have been giving a pep talk to people about to start new phases of their lives, but it would be just as easy to say this about a person entering a bookstore or a library ready to embark on a reading adventure. Today on my Facebook author’s page I shared a picture …
I’ve been giving you a behind the scenes look at how I go about beginning a new book. First I let you peek at a character sketch for my new character in Murder Is No Accident, Maggie Greene. Sunday I told you about how an old house in my town was the spark for the new mystery idea. Then a …
Often when I’m doing an interview, one of the most popular questions will be how or where do I get my ideas for stories. Sometimes the interviewer is more specific and asks where I got the idea for a particular story. That can be a hard question to answer clearly. That’s because ideas bombard an author from every direction. The …