Blog (Page 2)

A well-researched account of the lives of a pioneer family as they travel west to settle in the Michigan Territory, The Year the Stars Fell delves deep down into the nitty-gritties of daily life back then. The kinds of things most westerns or books about the early settlers gloss over. I appreciated that the author didn’t try to romanticize the hardships these people faced. She laid it all out for everyone to see, from the majesty of an untouched country to the ugliness and heartbreak of illness and destruction. I thoroughly enjoyed the setting and seeing what life could have been like in the earlyRead More →

Thought-provoking. A powerful story showing the battle between good and evil; a spiritual struggle of Light versus dark. Told from the perspective of a Methodist Episcopal missionary, Two Rivers is an interesting glimpse into the life of those seeking to reach the Native Americans with the gospel. I couldn’t help seeing similarities between what the main character was doing and the life of David Brainerd, and while the book was set in 1840, almost one hundred years after David Brainerd lived, it was easy to imagine that their lives must have been somewhat the same.  I’m not an expert on the settling of the westRead More →

Hey, folks! I just wanted to let you know that… the issue with my newsletter sign up has been fixed. I hope. I couldn’t figure out how to fix the issue, and it wasn’t showing up in any troubleshooting lists, so I switched providers. I’ve actually been wanting to do that for a long time, but none of the options I wanted were in my price range–until now. So when I found out this provider was available, I raced off to switch, and if you already signed up, you’re probably going to have to confirm you really want to hear from me. Again. Or somethingRead More →

…What interesting, unexpected thing do you do now that six months ago you never dreamed you’d ever do? And by calculating insulin, I mean I had to take a 22 day period, subtract the three highest amounts, add the rest together, and divide by 19. Then took another 22 day period, subtracted the three lowest, added the rest together, divided by 19, and compared the two numbers. What for? Well, Buddy’s insulin was running way too low by the end of each month, but to increase his prescription, we had to tell the nurse practitioner just how much insulin he was using/needing each day. We’dRead More →

I grew up on a diet of Christian historical fiction, westerns, classics, and just about anything else I could get my hands on. Particular favorites were Janette Oke, Lori Wick, Louis L’Amour, Alistair MacLean, Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, L.M. Montgomery, Francena H. Arnold, Mary Grant Bruce, and Grace Livingston Hill. As an older teen I branched out and read Linda Chaikin, Brock and Bodie Thoene, Hilda Stahl, and Francine Rivers. As as adult, I added in Georgette Heyer and Josephine Tey. There are probably more, but those are the ones I can recall off the top of my head. One thing they all have inRead More →

I was browsing through a group I follow on Facebook last night and came across a post that looked fun. It was a simple “vote for your favorite author” type thing. The trouble though, was that it started out with something like 25 options, but by the time other readers had finished adding their favorites, the list had grown to around 100. More readers wanted to add more authors, but they’d met the poll limit and were no longer able to add any more names. So they were listing names in the comments. It was fun to see which authors other readers liked, but alsoRead More →

I am here now to announce that… Your Heart For Mine, a novella set in the Taking Chances universe, will be releasing tomorrow, May 1st! I’m really excited about this one. Mostly because I love, love, love the cover. Isn’t it gorgeous? Josh went above and beyond my expectations, and I think I’m more excited about the cover than the story! I think—at least, I hope—you’ll enjoy the story as well, but the cover… 🥰 My aim is to make the ebook FREE on all platforms, but I’ve never done this before and I’m not exactly sure how soon that will happen. We set the processRead More →

So, I didn’t get around to posting yesterday, but I decided that was probably a good thing because I really didn’t have enough to say about the characters in my book to fill a paragraph, let alone a full blog post. Instead, yesterday was all about family. We packed up the whole family, filled a backpack with snacks, two others with water, and headed off into the woods on the back of the farm. Josh knew of a hickory tree the loggers had cut and was interested in seeing if the treetop had any straight lengths that would work for making an axe handle. TheRead More →

You might be sitting there wondering what the title of this post has to do with writing The Serendipitous Adventures of Maddison Case (note to self: choose shorter titles in future, they’re easier to type!) and you’d be correct in doing so. After all, everywhere you go in the writing world you’ll find people telling you that, whatever you do, make sure it’s real. Do the research. Read everything you can on the subject. Make it believable. When I wrote Yours, Mine, & Forever, I never calculated how much time I spent researching adoption. I still don’t know, don’t care, and aren’t going to try toRead More →

The Serendipitous Adventures of Maddison Case is part of the Celebrate Lit April Showers promo and I thought I’d share a little of the story of how it came to be. It’s still a work in progress, but it will be finished one day. I just don’t know when yet, because I’m not setting any deadlines. Today I’ll share where the idea came from and why I started writing a book that isn’t my usual genre. It went something like this… I started writing the third book in my Taking Chances series, Christmas Rose, back in early October. I assumed that, because it hadn’t beenRead More →