Inspired by Life ... and Fiction

Novelists bound by the pen, sisterhood, & more

A New Move

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Hi friends, and happy Wednesday!  I’m writing this from my new office in our new home in Florida. Yep! We just made a big move from Maryland, where we’d lived for thirty-one years, to Florida. Let me tell you, you can accumulate A LOT of stuff being in the same house for thirty years. Yikes!  We had a purging party, decluttered, and sent a ton to Goodwill and the Veterans Pick … [Read more...]

Braced For Impact

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As a writer, I spend a lot of time sitting at a desk. (I have the option to raise the platform my laptop sits on, but I concentrate better when sitting.) I’ve suffered from neck pain for many years, which long hours hunched over the keyboard don’t help!  I also experience some wrist pain after long writing sessions, and occasionally lower back pain as well. I know these are minor problems in … [Read more...]

ACFW 2024

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Ken and I just returned from the American Christian Fiction Writers Conference in New Orleans a couple of hours ago and my heart is full. And the authors of Inspired by Life...and Fiction were very well-represented during the gala awards night at the conference! Angie, Becky, Cara, D'Ann, Karen and I were all in New Orleans, but Tammy and Dani won awards even though they weren't able to be … [Read more...]

A Head Full of Characters … and Confusion

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Writers who write and publish on a regular basis are often juggling more than one story at a time.  Readers may wonder why, when they say to an author, “I loved it when Character A did XYZ,” that the author stares back at them with a deer-in-the-headlights look. That’s because the author is searching desperately through the old memory bank for that book’s particular information. At … [Read more...]

Book Settings – The Inexpensive Travel Agency

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Every year I host a Reading Challenge in my Posse group on Facebook where each month hosts a different theme. Some themes center around the covers, some on the authors, but I do my best to include at least one theme each year that centers on settings. One of my favorite things about reading is having a story transport me to another place and time. To experience the culture of the characters and … [Read more...]

Two 80th Birthdays

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We spent last week celebrating two new octogenarians!  My mom turned 80 on August 28. We celebrated big in July, with much of the family enjoying Park City, Utah, for a few days. But Mom was quick to remind us during that vacation that she wasn’t 80 yet!  On her actual birthday, we gathered a few of the grandchildren who were unable to make it to Utah as well as all three of her … [Read more...]

Are you a recipe fanatic?

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Scrolling through recipe videos, watching cooking shows, and even reading cookbooks is a favorite past time. I especially love revisiting my Mom's cookbooks with all her markings and notations. Talk about a treasure. I made Mom's banana pudding yesterday for Labor Day, which—I discovered while searching through recipes—is almost identical to Ina Garten's, aka The Barefoot Contessa. How on earth … [Read more...]

The Bible is not Fiction

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As you may know, I'm currently writing what is known as "biblical fiction" (the term makes me cringe, because if it's biblical, the biblical part shouldn't be fiction). My current book is about Sarah. Nearly every story in it either came from the Bible or from The Book of Jasher, an ancient text that is not considered inspired, but boy, is it interesting! Nearly all of the biblical novelists I … [Read more...]

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