It’s one of the oddest parts of being a novelist that your readers are more interested in what you do not tell them than what you do. Yes, the setting is delicious, the time-period intriguing, the action dynamic, the personalities gripping and surprising. You take a lot of trouble over your sentences and your paragraphs,…
Before I decided on a literary career at the age of forty I had been a failure. I was a film school reject directing stage plays in Germany and Austria for fourteen years, but there was not much money to be made in this line of business. I had also made a couple of shorts…
I’m that weirdo you occasionally see at an airport gate or in a waiting room; totally anomalous because I’m not a lonely planet orbiting around my digital sun. You can’t even see evidence of a digital sun on my person, which makes me rarer than a unicorn and appreciably suspicious. Of course, you might not…
Although it might be hard to believe, there were some good things that came out of 2020. We were charmed by Millie Bobby Brown’s Enola Holmes, and we laughed, cringed, and were unable to look away from the glorious trainwreck that was Tiger King. Sure, some days melded into each other. And fine, we’re all now Vitamin D-deficient.…
With the many challenges we have faced this year, I wanted to share something special this holiday season. After much thought and consideration as well as a fortuitous email from a reader requesting a recipe that never made it into a book, I came up with a plan to share 12 Days of Cozy Bakes.…
I like it when writers write about writers—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Well, actually, it seems the best stories aren’t about the good. It’s just not as much fun to hear about those days—the days when the words flow, everyone who reads their books gushes and loves them, and nothing interrupts the creative…
As with all the Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries, Hidden Treasure, the thirteenth entry in the series, uses genuine antiques to tell a fictional story. The questions that surround antiques are fraught with mysteries. Who designed it? Why? What was going on in their world that made this artifact appropriate or desired? Who produced it? Who…
Theodore Roosevelt is remembered for many things—so many, indeed, that periods of his life that would feature as headlines in the biographies of lesser mortals are relegated to mere footnotes in his legacy. That’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it; it certainly came as a surprise to me to learn that among his…
I grew up on sci-fi films during the eighties and early nineties, and nine times out of ten the villains sucked. Let me be clear: I’m talking about human villains, not the iconic creatures and robots spawned during that time period like the terrifying xenomorphs from the first two Alien movies, or the T-800 and…
Even if you aren’t a fan of classic English Literature, chances are that you will have heard of the Brontë family, of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their works of fiction and poetry. Of course, this is largely due to their extraordinary talents and remarkable novels that inspire and speak to generation after generation, but it…
