Some time's gone by, so I think I can talk about conference experience I had this year in a college town in the Northeast. I apologize ahead of time if this post seems labored and without a clear point. I traveled to the town by amtrak rail that connected with an amtrak-contracted bus line, and that was the part of the trip that I was most anxious about before leaving, but I needn't have been. The trip was smooth, the connection was easy, and to my delight, the bus terminal w

When I sit down to work on a novel, I try to engage my other senses in ways that open up my thinking but aren't intrusive. So, I usually have a candle or scent diffuser going, and I almost always music playing. The music needs to be wordless or in a language I don't understand, and the dynamic these days is dark and moody. As a teenager in a punk/artsy college culture, I could never imagine a future where I would not just tolerate but prefer long-form, new age-type compositio

Folks following the New Royal Mysteries might recall that Book 2 of the series was composed under the working title, The Clerk of the Orphans' Court, which was a short-lived government office title in Ohio's early history, and is the occupation of one of the main characters in the novel, Abraham Horup, the cousin to the founder of New Royal. Abraham is naive and earnest, and treats his position in New Royal's earliest administration as a sacred duty, but he makes mistakes of

June 2016 I was brought down by my gallbladder and pancreas, put me in the hospital for a week, and basically tore a huge chunk out of my summer. However, I did enjoy a delightful blog tour in support of my first Pandamoon Publishing release: The Juliet. The Juliet is a western mystery/thriller about a legendary emerald, and it combines scenes from a century in the emerald's tragic history with a weeklong search for her in Death Valley in 2005 during what was then called the

Howdy all--My page has been inactive for several months as we re-haul the site and as I busily write Books 2 & 3 of The New Royal Mysteries. Book 2: Crybaby Lane is due out in September, and you can get a sneak peek of the amazing cover below. The process for designing this cover was thrilling, as Don Kramer, the Director of Sales & Marketing for Pandamoon Publishing, conducted an online video-chat workshop with me, the publisher, and a few other Pandas to experiment with bas