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.

You may have noticed that I’ve begun a bit of a metamorphosis of late and it’s been a seesaw between excitement and terror. Fears sometimes pop up as I step out into something new— into being new. What if I make the wrong choice about what to do next?