About the Author
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My Next Grand Adventure: Moving from Orlando to Newark (and Reinventing My Writing Career)
I decided to leave Writer’s Atelier at the end of June 2024, blissfully unaware that it would be the least ground-shaking change of my summer. It’s not that I wasn’t happy as WA’s “admin.” (“Admin” because, as the founder will tell you, I happily wore many other hats. I invented a good number of them for the fun of it.) I loved the work and believed in the company. That job helped inform who I was as a writer and the role I played in the Orlando writing community, and I was deeply proud of the work I put in. Recently, however, I felt the pull towards story coaching become…
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My New Way of Looking at the Writing Process
My mother affectionately calls me a magpie. Everywhere I went as a child, I stopped to pick up shiny things and noticed little details others missed, a trend that’s continued all the way through adulthood. One of the many ways this trait shows up in my life is a fascination with gemstones, crystals, and pearls. I have many smooth shells picked up from family trips to the beach and pretty rocks I saw glittering in rivers on the hikes we’ve taken in Cuba, the Carolinas, and California, just to name a few. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when I had this latest epiphany about my writing workflow,…
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A Yearly Writing Schedule I Just Might Follow
In November of 2022, something magical happened. I “won” National Novel Writing Month by writing 50,010 words during November’s thirty days. And I’ve been chasing that high ever since. Apparently, I love the feeling of getting something done on a tight deadline. With 4thewords giving me daily deadlines in my writing life, I knew I could be unstoppable if I could pick a direction and stick with it. It turns out I also love numbers. (I know! I’m just as surprised as you are!) 4thewords gave me lots of delicious data to devour, so now I know how many words per month I’m likely to write when I’m not pushing…
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Why I Write Romance
There is almost always a thread of romance running through anything I write. Now, in honor of my inclusion in The Romance Writer Super Stack, I’m letting you have a peek inside my brain as to why I write romance—and why I always will. My first-ever favorite book was a romance. I bought Reincarnation by Suzanne Weyn at a Scholastic Book Fair in elementary school. The cover drew me, as did the premise when I turned over the back of the book to read the blurb. Two souls continually find each other through the ages—first as cavepeople, then again and again until they’re reunited in the modern day. I reread…
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Why Everything Looks Different Now
Our story begins with a single color. I can tell you exactly how that color came into my life, too: with this very website’s first color scheme, which was based off of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. I thought a mirabelle yellow would pop against the dark, classy red and muted gray-blue I’d also pulled from the painting. Plus, my birthstone is citrine, and if there’s one thing I love to do, it’s adding layers of meaning to make something more beautiful, the same way an oyster adds coat after coat to create a pearl. Now, I’m not one to half-ass anything. I commit, and I committed to my Scheherazade color palette, particularly…
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Why I Write Historical Fiction
You may recognize the painting. It’s Ferdinand Keller’s Scheherazade and Sultan Schariar. You will almost certainly recognize the story—or, rather, stories—behind the subjects of the work. When people ask me why I originally picked this image to wallpaper all over my website, I ask if they’ve seen the 1992 Disney animated classic Aladdin. Most of the time, the answer is yes. Even if it isn’t, I’ll sing the first few lyrics from one of the Genie’s songs and watch their eyes light up with recognition. The second line in “Friend Like Me” from Disney’s Aladdin alludes to one of the most well-known frame narratives ever. It revolves around a young…
