Category: Personal

  • Careful, You’ll End Up in my Novel

    Writers write what they know. Even if your story is set in a fictional, futuristic dystopian society, the characters’ behaviors and traits reflect what the writer knows. What the writer has experienced or witnessed. This past Christmas, my mother gifted me with a tea towel that reads “Careful, You’ll End Up In My Novel,” and…

  • What Joss Whedon Taught Me About Storytelling

    In 2009, Colleen Lindsay wrote a blog about what Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse could teach novelists about hooking readers. Good article. Really true, too. The art of storytelling has changed over the years. Our attention spans, as a collective audience, have shortened. Colleen’s post is mostly about how Dollhouse took a few episodes (like seven, according…

  • In Loving Memory…

    Yesterday an amazing and kind man left this earth. Benjamin Somerlot was only 28 years old. He bravely fought a rare and painful form of bone cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma for the past two years. The last few months of this life were spent in excruciating pain, but he never complained. He was always more…

  • Happy <3 Day!

    Twelve years ago today Ethan proposed to me. He stood in the tiny kitchen in our little cabin in the woods of Northern California and asked me to be his wife. He presented me with this teeny tiny emerald ring. All nervous, he was so adorable. I, of course, said yes. Sometimes I look back…