by Carol Pratt Bradley My family enjoys watching historical films and we loved the 2003 movie, Luther, about Martin Luther and the Reformation. I had also read a book about William Tyndale, the man who translated the Bible into English. At the time, I was searching for an idea forContinue Reading
You know how it goes. You sit down, ready to work. You’ve silenced your cell phone, closed the door, and set yourself up for 30 minutes of uninterrupted writing. You open your laptop ready to make another sizable dent in your project. After all, you’ve done everything right. You’ve setContinue Reading
by Alayne Kay Christian Colleen asked me to be a guest blogger just when I was about to enter into a major life transition. At one time, she suggested that perhaps I could share how I maintained my health during the stress of transition. Believe me, there were plenty ofContinue Reading
by C. Hope Clark Echoes of Edisto is the third in the Edisto Island Mysteries. Along the way, protagonist Callie Jean Morgan has suffered much in losing her profession as a detective, her husband, a child . . . then she relocates to Edisto unemployed, widowed, with one teenage childContinue Reading
John Rhys-Davies, perhaps best known for playing the dwarf “Gimly” in Lord of the Rings, had a repeating role years earlier on the television Star Trek spinoff, “Voyager,” as the holodeck recreation of Leonardo da Vinci. In an issue called “Scorpion, Part I,” the captain of Voyager finds herself inContinue Reading
I am still working full-time in addition to being a writer, so I am on my computer 10-12 hours a day between work and writing. I work out of a home office that is not set up ergonomically correct, so I consistently have back, neck and shoulder pain due to poor postureContinue Reading
Before I starting getting publishing contracts, I spent a lot of years writing and trying to become a better writer. A lot of years. I submitted to some publishers and agents along the way, but what really helped me to improve my writing was one thing: submitting to contests. Here’sContinue Reading
I now use a standing desk in my writing business. After researching the dangers of sitting for hours (over six hours increases your risk of, um…death), and looking into the options that are out there today for standing desks, I convinced myself I needed to make a change. I didn’tContinue Reading
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” In writing and in life, I have to remind myself of that fairly often. Do the best you can and don’t worry about it beyond that. But I worry. I stress. There’s no shortage of things to fret about. From the purelyContinue Reading
I used to have three cats—all strays that I had “rescued” over the years—but I’m down to only one, now. Myra was with me for nearly 14 years, and was a master bug catcher and laser light chaser. Sam, my Halloween cat (she showed up all bones around Halloween time)Continue Reading
Let’s face it. No matter how creative we are, sometimes the ideas slow down. We get stuck in the mucky middle of the novel. Or no matter how many walks we take, we can’t work out a nasty plot entanglement. Or our characters fall flat, or our blogs run stale.Continue Reading
by Pat Stoltey 2015 was a bad year for me, a year of stress and discomfort way beyond my usual challenges with arthritis and fibromyalgia. The laundry list of unfortunate incidents is too long to chronicle here. Two of the biggies: I spent more than three months early in theContinue Reading