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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I Honestly Don't Know How I Wrote that First Book!

I’m not talking about how hard it was to come up with the idea; that had been rolling around in my mind since I was twelve. I’m not talking about the challenge of structuring the story; I made it simple and told it in chronological order. I’m not talking about creating believable characters; I’d known…

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Writer's Block: the Tough Love Approach

Writers spend hours and hours talking about writer’s block and in my opinion, there’s no greater waste of time.  Workshops at conferences are devoted to the topic, and writing magazines often run articles offering tips on coping with that paralytic state. For those of you who are readers instead of writers,  writer’s block is a panic-inducing feeling that you can’t…

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My Desk, Three Months Before Deadline

 Even the dog bed is askew. Pictures of my characters. Manuscript pages everywhere. Almonds to snack on. Hand lotion for my weary fingers. My singing stuffed warbler, sent to me by a reader, sits in front of my printer. I can squeeze him whenever I need a bit of June in the midst of February. Thich Nhat…

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De-Trite-Us

One of the worst crimes a writer can commit is to be predictable in his or her storyline and characters. This holds true even in genre fiction, where a certain formula is generally followed: In a romance, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl reunite forever. In a mystery, a crime occurs, there…

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The Pledge: Back Slidin' on Day Two

Well, I woke up today with a small health crisis. Not a big deal, but big enough that it couldn’t wait until I get home, so I spent the morning searching for a clinic where I could be seen and remembering why, although I adore being far away from home on an island,  there’s a lot…

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Books We Loved in 2009

Time for a year-end wrap up of the stories that touched us most in 2009. I’ll start, and then I’d love to hear about your favorites. With the exception of The Help, these are not in any particular order. The Help by Kathryn Stockett: Sometimes you simply want to thank an author for writing a…

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Brainwashed

One of my favorite ways of coming up with book ideas is to stroll through the stacks at the library and see what books jump out at me. Years ago, a book that caught my eye was Gordon Thomas’s Journey into Madness. As a former therapist, how could I resist pulling that book from the…

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Up, Up and . . . Down.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to share some of the research that went into the writing of my recently resissued novel, Breaking the Silence. I’ll write about the secret CIA Mind Control experiments in which my character, Sarah Tolley, was a participant, and I’ll talk about  my personal experience with selective mutism, which is five-year-old Emma’s affliction.   …

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