There’s a question authors get asked all the time: I’m asked this question at least three times a week. Where do you get your ideas? And I always feel like there should be a much neater answer than the one I actually have/give. Maybe a secret room somewhere. A particularly magical notebook. A very organized…
There are stories I’m writing. There are stories I’m planning to write. And then there are the stories quietly living in the back of my brain, taking up space and apparently making themselves comfortable until I finally pay attention to them. Those might be my favorite kind. Because for me, a story rarely begins when…
Lately I’ve been thinking about how quickly everything moves online. One post replaces another. One trend replaces the next. Everything seems to disappear almost as quickly as it arrives. Sometimes it feels like we’re all being encouraged to move a little faster. Create more. Post more. Keep up. As someone who spends most of her…
Sometimes the most productive days don’t end with a higher word count. When most people imagine an author at work, they picture someone sitting at a desk, typing away until another chapter is finished. Sometimes that’s exactly what it looks like. But more often than not, writing begins long before the first sentence ever appears…
Sometimes people ask where a story begins. Was it a character? A single line? A plot twist? For me… more often than not it’s a song. The more I think about it, the more that makes perfect sense. Long before I became an author, I was a theater girl. I grew up loving Broadway soundtracks,…
Music has always been part of my writing process. Sometimes a song helps me find a character. Sometimes it helps me understand a scene. And sometimes it’s simply background noise while I stare at a blinking cursor and try to convince my characters to cooperate. Lately my playlists have been a mixture of old favorites…
A coffee shop, a notebook, and a few new story worlds. I have a list. Not a serious list. Not a productivity list. A coffee shop list. Whenever I hear about a cozy café, a local coffee shop, or a place that looks like it belongs inside a story, I add it to the…
For a while, the Atrium sat quiet. The lights were still on. The books were still on the shelves. The stories were still waiting where I’d left them. But after a season of burnout, I found myself spending less time in the spaces that once felt like home. I wasn’t writing as much. I wasn’t…