When I teach writing, I often start out by explaining the four stages of competence: unconscious incompetence, when you don't know what you don't know; Conscious incompetence, when you realize how much you don't know and how far you are from the goal; Conscious competence, when you develop some skills, but boy, you still have to work at it; and Unconscious competence--when you can do … [Read more...]

I may have posted about this before, but it's an annual spring tradition for me. When I was in high school, every year Mrs. Williams would lead us out of the classroom, down the sidewalk, and to the balcony beneath a sprawling live oak. There she'd look up into the canopy and receive Robert Frost's poem: Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a … [Read more...]

Because I indie-published my last book, I used ChatGPT as an editor--and it did a good job, I must admit. It didn't pick up subtext, and it had problems about remembering what had happened in the early part of the book, but it was really good about keeping my characters' tone consistent and not offending anyone's sensibilities. But in my story, God speaks to Josh. Not in long sermons or … [Read more...]

Yesterday I sat down to count the books I'd finished. I've been saying 165 for a couple of years now, so I did a recount and came up with the number of 173. What does that mean? Not a lot, really. It means that 173 times I sat down and put thousands of words together to tell a story or impart information . . . or sometimes both. Sixty-eight is the number of my years . . . and that number … [Read more...]

I've been thinking about this series because it's still popular and it's been out a while. (That's one advantage to writing historical fiction--it's never dated, because it started OLD.) The Cahira O'Connor series was born when Lisa Bergren, novelist and editor extraordinaire, was acquiring fiction for WaterBrook. She knew I was writing historicals, so she contacted me to see if I'd want to do … [Read more...]