This post isn’t meant to argue over the legal/financial ownership of a book’s text and characters, but the thoughts and inferences made of characters and text. If I read Winnie the Pooh and decided that Christopher Robin was actually the imaginary friend and the entire book was a metaphor for the plight of bears in modern society, am I […]

  I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. It’s what I do when I’m sick, stressed, can’t sleep, or just need an escape. So, I’ve been adding rapidly to my list of books read in 2015 as well as my list of flawed characters.  But, lately, I’ve been looking for a different sort of book: shifter books. I’ve aimed for […]

  As you may have seen from my Perfectly Flawed List of Books, characters with an easy run at life don’t interest me as much. I love characters who have bigger things at play than a little misunderstanding. In On His List, the main character Owen has OCD. In Past My Defenses, Vanessa had a real battle with allergies and […]

  I love a good villain. There. I said it. And I hate bad villains. Oh, not villains that are very villainous–I mean I hate villains who miss the mark. Villains who, when you get to the end of a story, are easy to overcome. The villains who fail to be a foil to the hero. (A hero is only […]

  “Where do you get your ideas? Easily the number one question authors are asked in my opinion. And also the most baffling to us. Why? Well, here’s a day in the life of an author:   For some inexplicable reason, I wanted cash to pay for my lunch today, so I stopped by an ATM. Locking my car, I […]

Likable vs. Unlikable Characters     This topic interests me from both sides. As a reader, I’ve noticed that nothing tanks my enjoyment/rating of a book as much as a character I’m supposed to like, but don’t. As a writer, this is something you have to straddle with flawed and realistic characters–have I made them empathetic or just pathetic? Do […]

  When I started writing a novel about an allergic shifter, I knew I was in familiar territory. Not because I can change to a wolf at will—as far as I’ve noticed—but because the idea was born of aggravation with my allergies. I’ve been fighting ridiculous allergies my whole life. How ridiculous? Well…when I was a child, I noticed some of […]