posted by Jeanne Munn Bracken

Over 20 years ago, I got the call that every writer dreams about. An editor at Oxford University Press was interested in publishing my Children with Cancer: A Reference Guide for Parents. I did the happy dance all over the place. Her name was Shelley Reinhardt, and over the next couple of years we polished off the book and sent it out into the world, where it garnered very nice reviews and is still sort of in print. I drifted into fulltime library…

posted by Doranna Durgin



I have learned to think small, and it is good. "What?" you say? *blink* you say?



Small press, that is. After a career of MMPBs and the occasional hardcover, I've found small press.



It started with Nose for Trouble. NFT was one of those projects that illustrated just how many ways one author can be screwed by many large publishing houses. Initially, submissions were solicited by an editor on a concept…

posted by Lorraine Bartlett

Pretty soon (this week?) my first published cozy mystery will be listed on Amazon. The world won't stop revolving--you won't even be able to pre-order it (that happens a few weeks later). But it's a BIG deal to me.

I'm not certain how soon after the announcement they upload the cover, but that's the next BIG step. A few weeks ago, my Writers Plot collegue Doranna Durgin shared her…

Posted by Sheila Connolly

Okay, I'll admit it: I have become a rock groupie.

I mentioned in my last blog that I had recently bought a concert t-shirt. It came from a Stevie Nicks concert, held not far from where I live.

Despite the fact that I came of age during one of the great eras of rock-and-roll history, I never went to concerts. (Note:…

posted by guest blogger Jennifer Roberson

As an only child, I found it perfectly natural to create imaginary playmates. I made up huge story arcs for my favorite three, and I have a very clear memory of these friends accompanying us when we moved to Arizona in 1957. In fact, one of them reflected a concern that apparently was foremost in my 4-year-old mind: on the trip he was bitten by a rattlesnake. But in time my three invisible playmates were…

posted by Leann Sweeney

That's where I am as I write this blog. New York. I came to here to see my daughter perform off Broadway in a tiny little theater at the Here Arts Center. She is a "performance artist" now, not just a dancer. What I saw was amazing. She combined origami, monologue, dialogue and dance. Don't ask me how, but it worked. At least for me. I am the mom, though. Moms opinions are not what performers are looking for. Just like writers should never rely on beloved…

posted by Jeanne Munn Bracken

I wrote an article a few weeks ago for the local newspaper about a doggy day care center. Visiting the place was a lot of fun and it made me want a dog again. Our old dog died last summer; I should blog about it, because she could have gone paw-to-paw with Marley for the title "World's Worst Dog." My husband and I are listening to the…

posted by Lorraine Bartlett

Even as I type this, my kitchen sink scrub brush languishes in a glass of bleach. So fearful am I of salmonella, staphylococcus, listeria, e-coli, and the like.

Yes, I've been Kim and Aggie-ized.…

posted by Doranna Durgin

The Chaos Factor is sitting at my feet.

No, seriously.

Heading home from agility practice to write this blog, with nothing more on my mind than the simple pleasure of disembarking the car to travel all of ten feet to the hose, dogs in tow, to rinse us all of the powdery soft drought dust, we encountered chaos in the middle of the road. Standing there, stupidly staring at the car, tiny tongue sticking out slightly between…

Posted by Sheila Connolly

I was planning to give you another profound, insightful and educational commentary about the literary world and the writer's life. And then I said to myself, forget it–it's summer.

So I'm going to talk about t-shirts. Summer reading, lite.

So there I was, standing in the local supermarket, guarding the full shopping cart while my husband went back and bought the six things he had forgotten the first time through, which took a while. Being a…

Posted by Leann Sweeney

I'm not talking about drugs or Alzheimer's here, though at times spaced out does describe my mental state. Okay, maybe half the time. Anyway, I am talking about the Internet. Again. I suppose a hundred years from now, when people can transfer their thoughts without benefit of keyboard or telephone or writing something in longhand (longhand probably won't take a hundred years to disappear), they will look back on how we socialize and publicize and…

posted by Jeanne Munn Bracken

About 20 years ago when my first book was published by an eminently respectable publisher, I received a form inviting my inclusion in Contemporary Authors (CA). I am a librarian, so I know that CA is a respected biographical source used often by students and other researchers.

I had a flash fantasy of professors wearing elbow-patched jackets, drawing on their pipes and helping their seminars limn the depths of Children With Cancer: A…

posted by Doranna Durgin



Yes, I'm back from another dog show/trial...last of the season for the this area. And although we did well enough in terms of success, the contrast between this show and the previous weekend's show is something I'm still pondering.



The first weekend held an agility trial. It was a single event show--agility only--held in a quiet park in a beautiful little high desert town just outside Sitgreaves National Forest. In most agility…

I've been waiting to hear from my editor. He's a very busy man. He works with some really, REALLY big-name authors. Supposedly he was reading my book over Memorial Day weekend and had liked what he'd read. So I'm hoping this is a good sign. Really good. Like, so good he's going to say, "PERFECTION, Lorraine! You're even better than BIG-NAME author!" (And no rewrite necessary!)

That's the way it is in my dreams, anyway.

In my real-life, I've been doing some editing of my own. As…

I consider myself a well-educated person, with a solid liberal arts education. And over the course of my education I've learned multiple languages: French (starting, officially, in third grade); Spanish (one year in middle school); Latin (one year in high school); German (two years in college); and most recently, Irish (three years and counting). So I thought I knew about languages.

I was wrong.

Recently a friend e-mailed me about a book she was enjoying, and asked some…

By Guest Blogger Charles Benoit

We’ve been promising ourselves to give it a try and after years of chickening out, my wife and I finally decided to jump in and just do it. Rose admits to nodding off now and then and at times I found it a bit like flogging a dead horse, but overall it’s been fun and, for me at least, highly educational. I highly recommend you give it a try. Start at the beginning, do a little bit each day and before your know it you’ll be totally into…

posted by Doranna

Ooh, it's that time again! A new cover!

It's been a while. Last fall, I was imminently expecting the cover for HIDDEN STEEL--and Silhouette canceled the Bombshell line. BACK TO THE RULES had also been completed...two covers worth of anticipation, squashed. So now I've just turned in the first Nocturne--contracts I picked up in the wake of those cancellations--which means it'll be a while before I see another Silhouette cover.

So…

By Guest Blogger Hank Phillippi Ryan

What if you could never be wrong? Never be late? Never call someone by the wrong name? Never make a mathematical error? Never choose the wrong word? And what if you could never wear the wrong outfit or have a bad hair day--and if you did, your fashion mistakes and hair disasters would be seen by millions of people?

That's the TV-centered life of an investigative reporter--the life I've lived for the past 30 years. It's a high-pressure,…

Posted by Jeanne Munn Bracken

Lately I have been in a food mode. Not cooking--who has time for that? Well, my retired spouse does, but somehow his leisure time has not translated into gourmet anything. It's meatloaf, spaghetti, tuna fish, repeat ad infinitum.

What I have been doing is reading about food. I didn't plan it, but before I knew it, I was listening to an audiobook about food, and reading both a nonfiction food book and a mystery in the culinary genre. Not a…

posted by Doranna Durgin

So I'm back from another agility trial weekend, this one a three-day event. It's Monday morning as I write this and I'm facing the week pre-exhausted. In fact, it's safe to say I'm already distinctly behind the curve.

Maybe it's not surprising that those close to me express mixed feelings about my canine performance activities. I train almost daily, whether in "formal" sessions or just small exercises for the dogs throughout the day. I participate in…