Writer’s weekend

Go away, damn snow! Melt, you stupid ice! Nothing is going to keep my writer friends and me from gathering this weekend to write and talk about our works in progress. I’m playing host for the Revisionaries’ first annual writer’s retreat, starting in a few hours. We’ve all watched the weather forecasts like little kids…

Inspiration: Collected Letters

  Sometimes, writing feels like this, a thousand letters (and not all of them familiar) come piling down on top of me. I can be driving down the Beltway, walking through the produce aisle, running on the treadmill. A thousand thoughts pile up on me, letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, Stories. It’s a miracle. Does it…

A nod to the fallen at Antietam

I spent many hours contemplating the ultimate sacrifice given by so many during the Civil War Battle of Antietam while I wrote DIVIDED LOYALTIES. Some 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after twelve hours of savage combat on September 17, 1862. Last week, while on my way to a travel writers’ conference, I took a…

INSPIRED: Mom’s cherished moments

It was just a kelly green notebook, the kind I used for Math and Social Studies. But inside, day after day, for years, it served as my mother’s diary. Mom documented all kinds of things inside: births, deaths, new jobs, Easter brunch, the day she finished her hand-hooked rug (It took a year and a…

INSPIRED: #amediting

I’m busy editing the manuscript of my Civil War novel. Cutting and pasting, rewriting and rethinking. Oh yes, and occasionally cussing over why I can’t keep things straight in Scrivener. (I’m learning!) So I laughed when I came across this photo from my visit to the Morgan Library in New York last December. When Lord…