Book Two of the Austen University Mysteries is upon us! The Portraits of Pemberley will be debuting on July 5th, and I am so excited for everyone to jump into this story. Caty was the perfect narrator for the first story, but she is now passing on the torch to…

Some humble offerings on what can really make you stand out as an author As an author myself who’s been in the slush pile, gone on submission, been rejected, been ghosted, been accepted and THEN rejected again, and every other variation of that process, I know how stressful things can…

What will your 2023 be? A few years ago, I decided to change the way I make New Year’s Resolutions. My ability to maintain specific goals each year has always been hit or miss. Sometimes I’ve managed to actually incorporate new habits, but I suspect like many people, I’m often…

Sometimes, ideas that don’t get off the ground just die. But sometimes…they can be reborn. (It’s alive… it’s aliiiiiive!) Tomorrow, my Gothic horror novel, Come One, Come All, will claw its way out into the world. To honor its book birthday, I wanted to take a look back on what…

Like (I suspect) many other writers, I’m an English teacher by day, and since it’s October, my class is being forced to read one of the great Gothic classics: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. This is not my first time reading the…

Louisa had thought the Pied Piper Carnival looked surreal in the scant photographic evidence she’d managed to piece together in her search, but if anything, it was even more bizarrely gaudy in person, tinged with the smell of desperation. Look at me! the freaks and contortionists all but shouted from…

Embracing the fear If you had asked me for most of my life what genres I like to read/watch, I would have said mystery, classics, romance, some fantasy, occasionally sci fi…pretty much anything but horror. Like many writers, I suspect, I was an overly imaginative child, anticipating monsters and bogeymen…

What are we watching, anyway? Author’s Note: My book club recently finished reading John Green’s collection of essays, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet. We were challenged to write one of our own reviews on something from the modern world, and this is what I came up with…

It’s all about the wet white shirt contest, 19th-century style. Author’s note: When I wrote the original version of this, some of the points made in my article were only hypothetical. In the year that’s passed, some important developments have been made, such as Sanditon indeed being renewed for a…