Are you a Nervous Nellie? Or perhaps you’re a Negative Nellie. Has anyone ever said to you, “Not on your…
Read more →Why use common words like untidy, contemptible, vain, simple, etc., when describing a person when there are so many fun…
Read more →𝑈𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑛𝑒 is a different kind of zombie book, one that will without a doubt grab your attention. I thought it…
Read more →How would you create an invisible sculpture, and would you be able to sell it? Your town is flooded and…
Read more →Did you know that cats once helped with an ancient battle? Monkeys escape from a zoo, and an emu is…
Read more →Are you a Nervous Nellie? Or perhaps you’re a Negative Nellie. Has anyone ever said to you, “Not on your…
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For this month’s Author Spotlight post, I interviewed Atty Eve, the author of the dark and powerful My Beautiful Suicide series. Was there anything that happened in your life that inspired this series? Anything you noticed going on in the world? The original inspiration for this series was the first line of a letter I…
Idlewild Hall is a place where the girls no one wants are sent. But there is more than learning going on in this boarding school. Then one of the students disappears. There are two timelines in this book: one in the 1950s while Idlewild Hall was an active boarding school and the other in 2014.…
Bring and take are two words that a lot of people are confused about how to use. I’ve heard them used wrong on television shows, in movies, and on radio talk shows. Is there a reason for this confusion? Some people grew up in regions or households where these words were consistently used in the wrong way. Others…
Nathan is not having a good day. He’s on a business trip, but that’s not the bad thing. The bad thing is that the building he’s in is attacked by terrorists who are after him, and he, along with his attorney, must escape them. He doesn’t just want to escape them though. While most would…
Who doesn’t like music? To say music is powerful is the understatement of the millennium. It activates our brain in ways nothing else can. It makes us feel emotions and remember times gone by. We know thousands—if not tens of thousands—of songs, but we think nothing of it. Music is an alphabet of twelve notes…
The words your character just yelled are so very important, and you want to be sure those who will be reading your story notice them. How do you draw attention to those words? How do you convey their importance to your readers?
Political intrigue surrounds a murder and the framing of the son of the president’s right-hand man, and the infamous Russians are involved. The political intrigue, along with the search for the fountain of youth, makes this story hard to put down. A man who appears to be off his rocker forces his way into the…
A monster is defined as a legendary animal combining features of animal and human form or having the forms of various animals in combination, as a centaur, griffin, or sphinx. Any creature so ugly or monstrous as to frighten people is also called a monster as is any animal or human grotesquely deviating from the…
Why did Daniel Greene want to write a series about zombies? Which scene in The Rising is his favorite? Which character? Are zombies the only danger the survivors have to watch out for? How hard is it for him to kill his characters? How has writing this series changed his life? What first made you want…
The Strigoi series is addictive. In Strigoi, Marek is betrayed and sent to hell. In Tread the Darkness, Marek is reunited with his family and adjusting to modern times. The focus of Three Come Unbidden is the love life of Marek as well as the love life of Dan. Still unseen by Marek, Ravagiu is…
Over forty years ago, I embarked on an incredible journey: digging up the roots of my family tree. It whisked me away to such remote places of the world as the quaint hamlet of Porlock on the southwest coast of England, where I found myself among pirates and smugglers. It dragged me through the bloody…
Traitors’ Fate, published February 13, 2018, is a standalone book that takes place after the events of Queen of Thieves, Book 3. It is suggested that you read Child of the Night Guild, Thief of the Night Guild, and Queen of the Night Guild first. About Traitors’ Fate Ilanna, Master of the Night Guild, has waged a war…
Are you scared of what lurks in the dark? The suirlang, a creature you don’t want to meet, doesn’t always lurk in the dark, but it does prefer to come out at night. You will know one is close by the horrendous stench that fills the air around it. The way this suirlang feeds is…
One thing we authors often hear is “kill your darlings.” This usually refers to the parts of our books we really like but may not work in the larger context of the story. That could include certain elements, tropes, or favorite characters. But some authors take a different approach to this. I asked Andy Peloquin,…
How much pain would you be willing to endure to be thought of as beautiful? To what lengths would you be willing to go to ensure that you were thought of as sexy? How much trauma would you be willing to put your feet and your body through? For me, wearing high heels isn’t safe…
What if you learned that your father was bent on destroying you and everything you loved? What if you discovered that your entire life had been a lie? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to grow up in the mob? Renee’s father is a tyrant and underboss for a powerful crime family.…
I started writing when I was a kid. I always loved to read and would get lost in worlds that were so vivid in my imagination. When I was in fourth grade, I entered a young writers’ conference and placed second. After that, I started writing short stories in spiral notebooks and eventually had too…
The dreary days and super-cold temperatures of this winter have left me longing for warmer days and sunshine. How about you? Have you ever been to the land of the midnight sun? Do your dogs like to apricate? Have you watched a turnsole follow the movement of the sun? What does alpenglow have to do…
Chase your dreams, they often say. How many truly get a chance to do so? In a world that is dog-eat-dog and whatnot, chasing dreams is something meaningless and devoid of context. It is an empty platitude and nothing more. Something strange happened in my case. The stars aligned and a very special woman made…
Dreams. We all have them, some more often than others do. No matter how often we have them, our dreams take us to other worlds, other situations, other realities. What if while you were asleep at night you could leave your body and go anywhere you wanted? Paul has sleep issues. It’s not that he…
Dreams are the focal point for most of my stories. The four books in The Watchers Series are based on a young man who can leave his body and go anywhere in his dreams—astral travel. Sway is about a man confronting his tormented past through a recurring nightmare. Until Then Dream Again is about a…
Is the burial of a dead body interment or internment? If a person dies without making a will, do they die interstate, intestate, or intrastate? Is a small island an aisle or an isle? Which one is possessive: it’s or its? interment, internment Interment is the burial of a dead body in a grave or…
How mad would you be if your husband was dreaming of another woman every single night? Would you be jealous? How would you react if he told you that even though she existed only in his dreams that he had fallen in love with her? How real are your dreams? A man is on his…
What would you call the cry of a newborn child? What about the sound that is made when your car runs over a manhole cover? When you’re so hungry you could eat an elephant, what sound does your stomach make? Cachinnation is loud or hysterical laughter. It is when you laugh so hard that tears…
