2022 Focus: Creativity

2022 Focus: Creativity

Normally, I would discuss the following year’s goals in my end of the year Book and Author News post. Undoubtedly I will when I work on it in a day or two. I wanted to separate out my focus for 2022, however, so that I can clarify the particular way I’m going to pursue those goals. Hopefully, this will also help other creatives struggling to produce. Productivity For the last few years, my annual keyword has been productivity. It’s a…

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A Better Place

A Better Place

Leave the world a better place than you found it. How do you do that? Not by complaining. Protesting and activism, arm-chair politicking, those do nothing; they change nothing. They’re futile and useless wastes of time. You’ll never make the world a better place by grumping about it. Not by running other people down, or placing blame or the burden of other people’s sins on them. How then can you effect change? By doing. By getting your hands dirty. By…

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Welcome to My Brain

Welcome to My Brain

Imagine a busy interstate. Say, I-85 running through Atlanta. Five lanes of traffic on either side of a concrete barrier. Every lane is full. Passenger vehicles sit nose to tail with semis, work vans, and limos. Spaghetti Junction soars overhead, an intertwined marvel of human engineering. It’s summer. The asphalt is scorching hot to the touch and radiates visible heat under the cars. Billboards line the highway, blaring a different movie on each screen. King Kong holds Fay Wray in…

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When Opportunity Knocks

When Opportunity Knocks

Until recently, I lived in a one-hundred-and-five-year-old house my dad inherited from his father’s youngest sister. The house was built by my great-grandfather, on land near where the family had resided for several generations. Dad talked about selling it off and on the entire time I lived there, and I knew he would try to sell it when President Biden started pushing to raise capital gains taxes. Still, when Dad told me he’d signed a contract with a real estate…

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An Open Letter to Writers of Every Stripe

An Open Letter to Writers of Every Stripe

My first literary read was The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. I found it on my paternal grandmother’s bookshelves, alongside works by Edgar Rice Burroughs and J.T. McIntosh. I was a locust back then, devouring any and every story I could find: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines, pulp SciFi and Fantasy from the ’60s, my maternal grandfather’s college literature and theological texts, whatever I could lay my hands on at the library, or at the homes of my parents’ friends…

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Please Pay the Author

Please Pay the Author

I give away a lot of books every month. Each giveaway is motivated by a strong purpose. Some stories are reader magnets for my newsletters. The Death Mask of Adlivun Cavus (C.D. Watson) and Death Omen (Celia Roman), while also available for sale (here and here), were both written to entice readers to subscribe to my newsletters. Others are a way to hook readers into a series, especially series that are difficult to advertise, which most of my books are….

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Mother Mary

Mother Mary

I write a lot of characters that are mothers. Many of the women in the Daughters of the People Series are mothers, for example, and several of the short stories in Apocalypse Weird are narrated by mothers or include mothers who play important roles in their respective stories. Part of this is due to my own state of motherhood; I’ve been a happy mother of one for more than two decades now. It’s therefore natural for me to create characters…

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The Place She’ll Never Be

The Place She’ll Never Be

Mom and her mother in Mom and Dad’s new house, summer time, circa 1988 – 1990. My dad is about to buy a one-story house located roughly half a mile from where my sister and her husband live. His current house, built by him and mom about thirty years ago, is two stories, and at his age, the stairs, well. His knees aren’t as good as they used to be. This house, the one he and mom built, holds a…

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What’s Past Is Prologue

What’s Past Is Prologue

I’m re-reading the Daughters of the People Series (Lucy Varna) to refresh my memory on the characters, events, and writing style, in preparation for developing and writing the final novel, War’s Last Refuge. The Prophecy, the first book in the series, was the very first novel I finished and published, and also the first one I rewrote. It’s been interesting to read just to see how my writing has changed. More, it was a complete surprise to discover how good…

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An Emotional Journey

An Emotional Journey

I received the proof of the print edition of The Vampyr Series omnibus (V.R. Cumming) in the mail today. This thing is massive. While the cover size is 6×9″, the same as the individual novels in the series, the spine is about 2″ thick. It needed to be. The print edition is 776 pages long and contains over 390,000 words of story. Yeah, big. First thing after I got it, I flipped through it, checking page counts and print quality,…

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