I finished writing Wake Me Up and was ready to publish it in 2011 . . . When I reread the book for the fiftieth time, I realized the opening needed to begin in the middle so that the characters could reflect backwards in time and bring readers to this present moment. This section didn’t…
The Virtue of Minding Your Own Business was a runner-up in an Ernest Hemingway Short Story competition. A tale of madness, murder, and regret . . . it is also the first of two stories in my debut eBook, Sandcastle and Other Stories. This story was inspired by the thought: What if the only thing someone wanted…
Zippy and Kipling made 2011 a year to remember. I used to play Freeze Tag with the neighborhood kids and all four of my siblings. Tag someone. Run fast. They have to freeze; remain motionless. The other variation, Statues, evolved from Freeze Tag, where you’d hold onto someone’s wrists and spin around and around and…
Here is a short interlude from my new novel, The Shut-Ins. The novel is about the residents of a small mountain town in the Pacific Northwest and how a contagion begins to change and cut off the people from the outside world. This short chapter takes place after one of the main characters comes across a…