on Reading and Writing and All the Speculation In Between
I delayed a long time this year before finally committing to the challenge–mostly because now I’m in school, and I’m having a hard enough time finding time to write fiction, I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge of daily blogging. Somehow, I managed. I think it had to do with guilt: I wasn’t…
I’ve made it to the end of another A-Z challenge–despite crazy MBA classes and four weekends’ worth of overtime at work. It’s shocking me a little, to be honest… so I thought I’d share the shock Anne experienced the first time she saw her new ghilen friend Shr-Zen hover on the verge of shifting back…
Since book two of Red Slaves brings in the Chinese angle on dragons, I thought it would be appropriate to comment on a Chinese word: Yi Ding means “certain” in the sense of “fixed, given, particular, or necessarily.” It’s the trap Anne falls into: She considers herself well-educated and firmly grounded in reality. So when…
This was another tough letter, until I realized one of the things Anne resents the most in Blood to Fire is her forced expat status. The book opens, in fact, with the revelation that she’s all but sequestered herself in a passive-aggressive rebellion against what she views as her entrapment in the Russian Federation. She…
Carla and I have counted, coordinated, and confirmed, and we have an official list of winners from the Rafflecopter that went along with my recent virtual book tour. 🙂 $25 Amazon Gift Card Beth Gallinger 5 Sets Autographed Paperbacks Amber Hall Beth Haney Mary Preston Tes Halim Tina Connor Myers 10 Sets eBooks…
As we’re getting to the end of the alphabet, I find it interesting that chapter 1 of Blood to Fire is titled “Visit”… So you get an excerpt today–the first few paragraphs of book two of the Red Slaves trilogy: There’s an annoying twinge intruding on my consciousness; I’m happy, tucked away in my stone…
I really struggled coming up with another U for this year’s Red Slaves theme… then I thought about all the things Anne does not want. Prime among them was the relationship and transformation she ended up with–but there was a deeper meaning to the unwanted theme, too. And… I won’t share it for its spoiler-tude….
I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to write about for T, but then figured the dislocation of travel was enough of a theme in my Red Slaves series to warrant comment. The superficial dislocation we feel when faced with a new location is but the most obvious of the changes we face. When, as…
I’ve made several references to Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn in talking about my Red Slaves series, so it seemed only fair to dedicate a post to this man. He was a dissident born in December 1918 and was the first to expose the western world to the Soviet system of gulags, or forced labor camps, through…
Although there is a significant rescue scene in Blood to Fire, and there are thematic elements about rescuing abused individuals throughout the Red Slaves series, they all constitute spoilers. So I’m going to talk about a different kind of rescue near and dear to my heart: Animal rescue. We rescued our second and third Siberian…