Finished! (And a First and Fifth Draft Comparison)

          I finished The Midwife’s Confession  yesterday and John and I are going to see Wicked this evening to celebrate. Yeah! The last month of writing a book is sheer torture; there seems to be no way around it. Every time, I tell myself I’ll figure out a way to prevent that last month from…

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Wordle Time!

I’ve completed draft four of  The Midwife’s Confession (well except for the epilogue), so it’s time to see how it looks on Wordle! Wordle helps me see what words I’ve overused. Of course the character names (and there are a lot of them!) are all over the place. Noelle, front and center, is the midwife.…

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Dup [doop]

The Midwife’s Confession is due a week from tomorrow, so if I blog this week at all, it will not be with anything profound! Right now I’m writing drafts three and four at the same time. Hard to explain, but that’s what I’m doing. (Keeper and Jet are helping me organize the mess of paper on the…

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The Many Lives of CeeCee Wilkes

The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes is back again, this time as a mass market (small-sized) paperback. Her cover is nearly identical to the trade paperback cover, which I’ve always loved. I’m so happy she’ll (yes, I think of this book as a ‘she’ instead of an ‘it’) have a chance to reach those readers…

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Bookclub Bonding

I had such a treat this evening. I received an email a while back from a woman named Jodi who invited me to visit her bookclub. All the women in her club work at a preschool in Cary, NC, but they spend a weekend together on Topsail Island each year. It so happened they’re on…

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The Joy of Third Drafts

Ah, Topsail Island. We just went out to dinner (shrimp and grits for John, shrimp scampi for me) and had a look at the sound on the way home. I snapped this picture with my phone. I’ve always loved how this particular house juts out into the water. The sun and sky were such an intriguing color. It…

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Know When to Fold 'Em

Whoa, this is what I look like after a few weeks of working ’round the clock. Tired. John snapped this pic of me at Starbucks this morning while I was writing. He said “Give me a big smile!” and I thought I was. I think I’m fried! It’s always this way in the month before…

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Sometimes Change is Good

If you had a chance to change something you created a decade ago, would you take it?  I have that opportunity as some of my older books are being reissued, and since I’ve been asked if the reissued books are identical to the originals, I thought I’d talk about that here. The truth is, it varies from book to…

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