My middle daughter, who’s fifteen, is pretty crackerjack at horror make-up. Ever since going to theater camp when she was eleven and taking a special FX class, her Halloween costumes have been killer. But it’s my twelve year-old daughter who really loves horror. She binge-watches anything from Twilight to the…

Last week at the dinner table, my middle daughter (age 15) performed a cheeky, dramatic reading of a sweet love scene I wrote for my upcoming fantasy-romantic novel, Savage Island. “Will’s kiss is wild,” my daughter cooed. …

Glenn Miller was the king of swing until his plane disappeared over the English Channel in 1944. He’d been in London, broadcasting both entertainment and counter-propaganda when he got on a single engine plane to Paris, never to be heard from again. When I was a little kid, growing up…

Historical fiction writers are in a deep funk. Sales are down in this great genre and most agents aren’t even looking to take on hist-fic novelists unless they’re somehow the type who can can get their stories folded into other genres like thriller or fantasy. The success of novels steeped…

A few weeks ago, a blue-checked member of the Twitteratti, a man named Duncan Jones, posted this on his Twitter feed. I have 2 kids. 2 1/2 years & 9 months old respectively. I’ll tell you something I never see anyone admit… they are exhausting, frustrating & life-destabilizing. They are…

We decided to forego our middle child’s usual summer camp this year, opting instead for a City Mouse — Country Mouse adventure with one of her best camp friends. A girl named Isabel who lives several states away in the Big Apple. For one week, our country girl will spend…

Last week my family and I went to St. Louis for my mother-in-law’s 92nd birthday. We had a terrific time visiting family and friends, swilling a bit of whiskey in old haunts, and walking (or driving) down memory lane. On one of these jaunts into the past, we drove our…

In both fiction and real life, the hero has had a rough journey over the past hundred years. Two World Wars, a depression, a Cold War, a cultural revolution, several skirmishes — military and political — and a jihad have left us in a state of near nervous breakdown. The…

My husband and I celebrated our seventeenth wedding anniversary last July. As far as commemorating the occasion, to be honest, we fell pretty short. In fact, we both forgot. And this was hardly an isolated incident. There have been years when the only time we “remembered” was when we played…