I may be going against the grain here in looking back as opposed to looking forward with aspirations and goals. But as a 31-year-old mom of three, who homeschools part time and works part time, I don’t have much bandwidth for idle experimentation

I stare at the blinking cursor, and it taunts me. “Write something, write something…” I close my eyes and listen to the sound of rain lightly tapping against the window. I really don’t feel like showing up here today, because the words certainly don’t seem to be showing up for me. Closing my eyes I imagine myself curled up on my bed with a bit of chocolate and that TV series rerun I’m currently engrossed in...

When crafting my Christmas novella, The Swedish Milkmaid, I drew on my heritage of growing up around milk cows. When I was a child, my Grandma Mae showed me the indentation she has on her legs from holding the milk bucket between them.

I may be in the minority here and this may not be the healthiest trait, but I cannot create beautiful things if my house is a mess. I constantly have an invisible check list in my head that I need to complete, to feel at ease, which is something that is vital to my ability to write or create anything cohesive. Here's my strategy to orderliness:

I’ve been sitting on this story for about a decade, but it keeps resurfacing and remerging, like a stick that disappears only to be brought back up by the current of life. I can sense that currant shifting, the course of this gentle ebb and flow giving way to the great turner of the tide and calmer of the storm.