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*Written with Veridion Smart

There are seasons when writing flows so naturally that the words seem to know where they’re going before you do. Then there are seasons like this one, when life quietly closes your laptop, asks you to look up, and reminds you that some stories must be lived before they can ever be written.

The past several weeks has been filled with interruptions just like those.

Texas weather has reminded us that we’re never quite as much in control as we’d like to believe....

*Written with Veridion Smart

Sometimes history isn’t remembered because it was written in books. Sometimes it’s remembered because someone around the dinner table told the story one more time.

This Fourth of July, America celebrated 250 years. That number is almost impossible to comprehend. Two-and-a-half centuries of victories and failures, of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, of families building homes, raising children, grieving losses, celebrating milestones, and somehow passing...

*Written with Veridion Smart

There should probably be a more elegant word for how I’ve been feeling lately. But honestly?

Discombobulated works just fine.

Over the last several weeks, life has been wonderfully full. Family came. Old friends visited. We traveled. We laughed. We watched basketball games that nearly required medical intervention. We made memories I wouldn’t trade for anything. Then everyone left.

And suddenly there were bills on the counter.

Laundry.

Emails.

Writing deadlines.

Doctor...

*Written with Veridion Smart

Sometimes strange things happen when old friends come to visit after a long absence. Places you stopped noticing years ago suddenly come alive again. The roads you drive every day feel different. The restaurants you take for granted somehow become memorable again. The old buildings, little diners, museums, ranches, horses grazing in open country, even the smell of the air after a Texas storm – all of it begins to feel new because you’re seeing it through someone...

*Written with Veridion Smart

There’s a quiet belief that many writers hold onto: If the story is good enough, it will find its way. Then somehow, without effort or intention, the right reader will magically appear.

Sometimes that’s actually true. Think Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, who wrote that amazing novel primarily for her own amusement while she was recovering from a chronic illness.

Think A River Runs Through it and Other Stories, a beautifully written,...

*Written with Veridion Smart

There are the stories we write…and the stories we almost didn’t.

You know the stories I’m talking about. The ones we hesitate over, the ones that feel too close, too real, too revealing. The ones that don’t feel like fiction at all. Every writer knows that moment where the truth begins to press a little too hard against the surface, where the story starts asking something back from you. It doesn’t want skill, or structure. It wants honesty.

And that’s where many...

*Written with Veridion Smart

There was a time when writers could simply write. They could pour their hearts into a story, send it off to a publisher, and trust that the people responsible for bringing books into the world would also help bring readers to them.

For a handful of authors, that world still exists. For most of us, it doesn’t.

Today, whether we’re self-published or traditionally published, writers are asked to wear many hats. We are storytellers, researchers, editors, and...

*Written with Veridion Smart

Before any book finds its readers, it begins with a difficult question. In the case of TIP THE PIANO MAN, the story was inspired by real events that refused to let me look away. While working on this novel, I often found myself reflecting on the kinds of stories that challenge us rather than simply entertain us, the ones that force us to sit with uncomfortable truths while still searching for meaning. The following reflection grew out of that process and speaks to...

*Written with Veridion Smart

Writers like to imagine ideal conditions. Silence. Time. Clear mental space. But real life rarely cooperates. Sometimes the house is loud. Sometimes grief sits too close. Sometimes the world keeps intruding when all you want is stillness. And yet, stories continue to surface.

Writing doesn’t always happen despite chaos. Sometimes it happens inside it.

In my house, the romantic month of February is more than chaotic. It’s loud, and expensive, and…way too short. Kevin...

*Written with Veridion Smart

There comes a moment in writing when something quietly shifts. You sit down with a plan, a scene, a direction, a tidy intention – and suddenly the characters refuse to cooperate. They pause where you expected movement. They speak words you didn’t outline. They make choices that feel… inconvenient.

And yet, truer.

This is often when writers panic. I’m losing control. But seasoned storytellers know better. This is the moment when the story begins to breathe on its own....

*Written with Veridion Smart

There’s a moment that every long-form writer reaches often without realizing it at first - when the story quietly shifts hands. You may have begun with a plan. A plot outline. A destination clearly marked on the map.

But then, one day, a character says something you didn’t expect. Or refuses to do what you told them to do. Or walks straight off the page and into territory you never intended to explore. And that’s when you know: You’re no longer writing a single...

I’m goal-oriented and a self-starter, but I have no use for New Year’s resolutions. If I’m honest, I’ll tell you that I think they’re a waste of time.

As I write this, I’m fighting my annual case of the crud and I’m completely deaf in one ear, my eyeballs are pounding and unfocused, and my lungs burn like they’re going to explode. My brain is a fuzzy combination of cold medication and pain relievers. So, right now I couldn’t set a goal even if I wanted to. I couldn’t make a list about my...

Most of my instructors in high school were pretty good, and some were downright comical without meaning to be, but my freshman English teacher was stupendous. I’ve never had a teacher as magnificent as she was, before or since. Her name was Celina Rios (Miss Rios to her students), she was young and beautiful, and every jock in school signed up for her English class just because they wanted to look at her.

But to those of us who were serious about academia…well, that was a different story...

Before I get started here, please let me thank VERIDION SMART again for their help with my blog during the last two months. You guys were wonderful, Johnny-On-the-Spot with deadlines (very important to this old journalist), and gave me so much to think about! I appreciate you more than I can say.

But, now, it’s time for me to get back to work!

My husband, Kevin, and I have gone on two research trips up to the gorgeous canyonlands of Texas (one in October of 2024, and one in October of 2025),...

*Written with Veridion Smart

There are some realities too painful to face head-on. We avoid them in conversation. We turn away when news headlines break our hearts. We even convince ourselves they happen ‘somewhere else’ to ‘someone else.’

But fiction refuses to let us look away.

When we step into a story, we do so willingly. We open ourselves up to experiences we might otherwise resist. That’s why novels like TIP THE PIANO MAN matter so deeply. The story of child psychologist Dr. Madison...

*Written with Veridion Smart

When people learn that much of my writing is rooted in trauma, they often ask: Doesn’t it hurt to revisit those shadows? My answer is always, Yes, but…no.

Yes, because pain doesn’t disappear simply because we give it words. It lingers, it aches, and sometimes it sneaks up on us in the middle of a sentence. But no, because writing transforms pain into something else: Connection. Meaning. Hope.

When I wrote TIP THE PIANO MAN, I wasn’t just writing about Madison or...

*Written with Veridion Smart

We like to think of ourselves as independent beings, charting our own paths, free from the weight of the past. But the truth is, every story we live and every story we tell carries the fingerprints of the generations before us.

When I began writing WHISPERS THROUGH TIME, I didn’t set out to write about ancestral trauma or generational memory. But the characters had other ideas. Sierra’s journey isn’t just her own, it’s a continuation of her mother’s, her grandmother...

*Written with Veridion Smart

Have you ever closed a book with tears in your eyes, only to realize you feel a little stronger, a little braver, than before you opened it? That’s the strange and beautiful paradox of storytelling: sometimes a story has to break us before it can begin to heal us.

I’ve believed in the power of story since I was a little girl with my nose buried in library books, but I didn’t fully understand its impact until much later in my life. When my family faced some of its...

When I was young, I remember vividly sitting with friends, talking about nothing in particular – and while we were talking, I’d see a picture of my friends and me in my head. I’d mentally describe the room, the table, our clothing, and I’d pick out a subject in the conversation that I could focus on. Someone would laugh and instantly I’d think, Her laugh sounds like … fill-in-the-blank. Tinkling over stones. Like a stream in spring. A bleat…like…a baby goat. A donkey’s bray. I could get so...

In 1999, I answered an ad from a young man who was looking to start up a regional monthly periodical for seniors (who are vastly underserved in most markets, short of Medicare and hemorrhoid ads), and he was hunting for experienced article writers. To make a long story short, I took him some of my work, he hired me on the spot, and within a couple of weeks he asked me to be his editor-in-chief. Well, I didn’t know where this gig was going to take me, but I was a brand new empty nester, I...