This is my childhood piano: A Baldwin spinet that was already seven or eight years old when my parents bought it. I was about nine when it came to live at our house, so we’re roughly the same age. It was long both the instrument of my torture and my delight. Maybe I’ve written …Read More

Today was a holiday. Holiday. Holy Day. Officially, it was a holy day of obligation, which means I should’ve been at church bright and early, mindful of the children tripping over one another at the Easter egg hunt, and sharing communion with my church family. But for various reasons I didn’t make it there this …Read More

Carolyn Haines, wildly prolific author of over 70 (!) books, has been on my radar screen for a long, long time. But I’ve just gotten to know her a little better, and I want to introduce her to you, too. Carolyn writes and lives way down in Alabama, and while I think she would laugh …Read More

I’m so glad nature knows what it’s doing. Here we are at the end of March, and spring, whether winter likes it or not, is finally here. Not so as you could tell by the thermometer, but the signs are all around. The branches of my rose bushes are tipped in red, the iris and …Read More

Growth is messy. I uploaded this photo of our ravine without taking a really good look at it. I was fixated on the late afternoon sun peeking over the hill and treetops, and thinking “light! life!” *cue angelic chorus* But seeing the whole image, I’m reminded that there’s much more going on here. Buttressing the …Read More

Sometimes we can be too close to a thing. Over the past few weeks, when I’ve only been putting between three and four hundred words a day on the next Bliss House manuscript, I’ve felt as though I were operating a kind of microscope in reverse. Observing tiny dots of detail backwards through the lens, …Read More

The next eight days or so are going to be very compressed for me. I have word that the first edit for BLISS HOUSE should land in my inbox on or about December 18th, and after it arrives I will need to hide myself away for about a month to work in those changes. I’ll …Read More