• Weekend Writing Warriors 8-Sentence Sunday #7

    The first two weeks of 8-Sentence Sunday, I gave you snippets from my completed novel, Like Fine Wine—the story of Julie Miles, a widow who’s come to Chicago to try to regroup after losing her husband of over thirty years. Just for fun, I’m returning to that story this week. After all, I need to keep you intrigued with two different novels that are both releasing this year. Here we go… In the last snippet, Will Brody, the hot guy across the hall, stopped by to check on Julie. He’s attractive and kind and funny, and Julie can’t seem to help responding to him. She’s shocked to realize that her…

  • Weekend Writing Warriors 8-Sentence Sunday #6 Redux…

    This snippet from The Music Is You picks up where last week’s left off with Carrie opening the door to her worst fears—Liam Reilly, the man she’d loved and lost sixteen years earlier. She broke his heart and this is his opportunity to find out exactly what happened so long ago. He has the upper hand at the moment, but that could all change… He hadn’t changed much—a little brawnier, a few gray strands threading through his dark red hair, some lines around his eyes. The gray-streaked goatee was new, but basically he was the same Liam Reilly. What a crummy thing to do, blindsiding me first thing in the…

  • I’m So Special…

    My pal Skye Hughes  nominated me for the Liebster Blog Award. Thanks, Skye! The Liebster Award requires the following (which I snagged directly from Skye’s post): You must tell 11 things about yourself Answer the questions your nominator gives you. Create 11 questions for the bloggers you nominate. Choose blogs with fewer than 200 followers and link them to your post. If you’re nominated, please leave a comment on this post with the URL of  your Liebster Award post. In the interest of keeping this blog post down to novella size, I’m going to say that answering the 11 questions below covers the first rule, which is to tell 11…

  • Weekend Writing Warriors 8-Sentence Sunday #5

      Another snippet from The Music Is You, my current WIP. Carrie has confronted her old friend and former teacher, demanding to know how Maestro Liam Reilly has shown up in Frankfort, Michigan. Eliot confesses he invited him, telling her she needs to face him and deal with their issues. Carrie spends a sleepless night wondering how she’s going to cope with Liam’ s sudden reappearance in her life after all these years, but the next morning… Barefoot, she ran down the steps from the loft. Eliot had a lot of nerve showing up this early. Surely he knew she didn’t get any sleep last night. She threw open the…

  • Weekend Writing Warriors 8-Sentence Sunday #4

    Last week, I posted a first scene snippet from my current work in progress/revision, The Music Is You. Carrie Halligan’s worst fears are realized when her former lover, symphony conductor Liam Reilly, suddenly appears in the small Michigan town where she’s raising her son as a single mom. Liam’s surprised to see her too, and in this later scene, he’s in his hotel room, trying to wrap his mind around the events in the bar earlier.  Here’s another snippet from that book, this time from Liam’s POV. What he’d recognized was the way she played—leaning into the piano, her slender fingers dancing lightly across the keyboard, emotion caressing each and every…

  • Spam…Not the Meat-in-a-Can Version

    I’m baffled. My website guru has done all he can to prevent me from being spammed—you know when some robot trashes your blog with about a hundred comments, selling everything from luggage to t-shirts? It seems when I post more frequently than once a week, I end up coming in to clean out a ton of spam. The good news is all comments have to be approved here, so none of this crap is ever seen by my readers. But geesh, it’s demoralizing to get a note saying “you’ve got 36 new comments,” only to find out I have 5 new comments and 31 spam attempts. So how is it getting…

  • Weekend Writing Warriors 8-Sentence Sunday #3

    I’m stepping away from Like Fine Wine for a week to give you a tiny taste of another book  I’m doing revision work on, The Music Is You. I think I might go back and forth between them for a few weeks because LFW’s main character, Julianne Miles was a secondary character in Music, which is her best friend Carrie’s story. Carrie Halligan is a single mom, raising a teenaged son on the shores of Lake Michigan in a small town near Traverse City. Her world gets turned upside down when her son’s father, sexy symphony conductor Liam Reilly, suddenly appears on the scene after almost sixteen years. Carrie once…

  • The Backstory Dilemma…

    …is my topic for today. I intended to tell you about how hard it is to fit in what I know about my characters without info dumping all over the page. Whining was imminent because I am stuck, stuck, stuck in revisions on The Music Is You simply because I want to tell my readers way too much.  I’m cutting furiously and wondering how in holy hell I’m going to have a story when I’m done. Yes, yes, yes—I know—only last week, I was in celebration mode because I finished Like Fine Wine, so whining seems rather selfish at this point. But that one’s done. It’s out with the beta…

  • Weekend Writing Warriors 8 Sentence Sunday #2

    I got such a terrific response last week, here’s another eight sentences from Like Fine Wine. Julie is getting settled into her friend’s apartment, but the guy across the hall is more than a little distracting. In this scene, he’s stopped by to see if she needs anything from the market before the snow storm that’s due, and Julie catches herself being…well…distracted… I leaned against the sofa, arms crossed under my breasts, simply gazing at him. I was frozen there, unable to respond, my mouth as dry as a desert. Was I actually lusting after a guy who’s practically a stranger? And almost young enough to be my son? Yep.…

  • The End

    What a wonderful feeling to be able to type “The End” at the finish line of a long arduous writing experience. I have another novel done—really, truly done! And my critique partners are on-board, one even said, “This gave me goose bumps” about the final scene. Goose bumps! Can I get any better than that? It’s out to the betas right now and I’m dying to hear what they think. This book, Like Fine Wine,  may be close to ready, but I’ve got the finish the other one before I can go forward with my plans for it because the heroine in LFW is a secondary character from The Music…