A Stone House in Oceanside

A Stone House in Oceanside

There are several scenes in Leaving Ordinary, which are set in St. Paul, Minnesota. One of my St. Paul research topics was boardinghouses in the 1920s. …

Louise Watches Over

Louise Watches Over

During the rounds of Leaving Ordinary edits, I dropped into a mental hole of ugly and semi-brutal, weeks of self-doubt. I asked myself, Was my novel any good? …

Louise's Meet & Greet

Louise's Meet & Greet

I began writing fiction in the Fall of 2014. In February 2015, I took an opportunity to go to a four-day Haven Writing Retreat in Whitefish, Montana. The retreat sounded fun …

Chill-out Pass

Chill-out Pass

Several days after I published my first novel Hiking In, I felt lousy and was out-of-sorts. I wasn’t ill. I hadn’t participated in any overly vigorous exercise. I chalked it up to having a few ‘not great’ days. Almost a month later, a reader generously notified me that in the novel's Author Notes, I had a misspelling. Somehow ‘Chilkoot Pass’ had been changed to ‘Chill-out Pass.’