Have you ever bluffed your way into a job? In my ongoing task of digging through the overwhelming amount of my family’s old photos and papers to form some semblance of an organized archive, I’ve recently encountered episodes of my life that I haven’t thought about in years. Including the one that turned me into […]
Today is my 5-year anniversary as a member of The Stiletto Gang! This has me thinking back to September of 2020, when I first joined this illustrious group of writers. The invitation to join the Gang coincided with the delivery of a new cover image for The Body Business, Book 1 in my Samantha Newman […]
Whatever happened to the classmates in your old school yearbooks? What happened to their dreams? And what happened to yours? Are all the memories tucked away in a box somewhere, or proudly displayed on your bookshelf? Have you looked at them lately and reminisced? Or were those years best left to be forgotten? In my […]
In my ongoing effort to declutter, I’ve been taking books to the Family Garden in the park and filling the Little Library there. I’m always thrilled when the last batch I loaded has been taken, and I’m happy to fill it up again. But on occasion, there are a few oldies I just can’t part […]
Help! I’ve burrowed down another rabbit hole, and I’m stuck in a warren full of of too many possibilities. So deep am I into the research for my next book that I lost track of time. Which is to say, I almost forgot to write this post. With no plan for what to post today, […]
There are all sorts of mothers in modern literature, from the unbearably overbearing and ambitious Mama Rose in Gypsy to the kind, upstanding, Marmee in Little Women. This past Mother’s Day weekend, the local paper published an article about the “Mother’s Day Index” a numerical attempt to calculate the monetary value of a mother’s work, […]
My husband is a fan of television games. His favorite? Jeopardy! He likes to record new episodes for us to watch together whenever there’s a half-hour break in our day. Lately, I’ve noticed that librarians are among the more successful contestants. It makes sense, I suppose, because a primary requirement for both jobs is to […]
There are two kinds of people in this country: those who love Daylight Saving Time, and those who don’t. There’s a third group, I suppose: those who can’t decide, even though the reality of it has been around for nearly sixty years. The U.S. tried it twice before, during World Wars I and II, in […]
I’m delighted to welcome a remarkably prolific author to the Gang as our guest today. Pamela Fagan Hutchins and I met early in our writing careers. Since then, she has published upwards of 30 books, mostly novels (award-winning romantic mysteries, a couple of children’s books, and some non-fiction, too). Lately, she’s been turning out some […]
Over the weekend, a series of New York Times articles about the pleasures of reading aloud sent me thinking backwards and forward again. Backwards to my earliest memories of listening to my Mom or Dad read Horton Hatches the Egg or some other wonderful classic to me. Those lovely moments are imbedded deep in my bones. I’m […]