I’ve never understood how two authors with different muses, voices, and ideas, could, combined, form one cohesive work. Sure, Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim Lahaye co-produced the legendary Left Behind Series, but … those men are clearly brilliant, which I am not. I struggle to keep my own plot threads straight. Why in the world […]
Behind the Scenes: Author June Foster tells a shaggy dog story
Last summer, my husband and I spent three months in the tiny town of Shell, Wyoming, population 50, at the base of the Big Horn Mountains. In our RV, we performed what is called “work-camping” at Shell Campground and Cabins. Mainly my husband worked. We gave them 20 hours a week in return for a […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Susan M. Baganz and the tomboys
A couple of things went into writing Donuts & Detours. I was inspired by a young woman I once knew who hid her femininity and had a rocky past with her family of origin. I added that to another young woman who loved working on cars. Her parents tried to dissuade her from that line […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Mary (ML) Hamilton finds a mystery in a newspaper
Does anyone out there still enjoy getting your news from a newspaper? I look to the Internet for up-to-the-minute news, but there’s nothing better than a newspaper for leisurely reading about what’s happening around the local community and the state. You just never know what you’ll stumble across. For example, years ago while living in […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Bonnie Engstrom answers reader questions
As soon as someone asks what you do, the first question is either “When did you start to write?” or “How long have you been writing?” No one ever asks how long you’ve been published. Many people view writing a book like an ethereal cloud to grasp. They don’t understand how much hard work it […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Glenn Haggerty thinks like a bad guy
My story ideas usually start with a visualization of a scene in my head, often a dramatic moment. So, my novel Chase was initially just a picture in my mind: a bad-guy drug-dealer meets with one of his runners. The incident then turned into a scene which expanded into a full-length novel. Interestingly, I ended up cutting […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Pamela S. Meyers dreamed of traveling back in time
Having grown up in the small resort town of Lake Geneva, WI, I’d heard for as long as I could remember how the wealthy of Chicago had come north to Geneva Lake after the Great Chicago Fire to build large (sometimes gargantuan) homes on the lakeshore to house their families while the city was rebuilt. […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Sara L. Foust and her dream career
The heroine in my debut novel, Callum’s Compass, is Kat Williams. She is a wildlife biologist tasked with documenting spring salamanders in select water sources of Anderson and Morgan counties here in East Tennessee, where I live. I chose this career path for her for a number of reasons. Having her out in the forests […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Lisa J. Flickinger tells of a childhood trip
The original seed for my latest release Fool’s Notion was planted long before I put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard). When I was nine years old, my family packed foodstuffs, clothing, and my grandmother in our brown panel van and drove eighteen hundred miles to Los Angeles for a vacation. We toured the amazing Disneyland, […]
Behind the Scenes: Author Shannon Taylor Vannatter & the city girl living in an abandoned farmhouse
A few years back, a young single woman from our church had to move out of her apartment on very short notice. The only new place she could find where she could move in quickly was in the country. The house belonged to another church member, but it was old and had been uninhabited for […]