One of the hardest things about writing for me is titles. And names. But today, titles. Titles often have themes, or at least some sort of similarity of form. Titles also have to convey the tone of the book, entice the reader, and hopefully be memorable. As much…

Authors are creative beings, so we can have muses. I have one time had creative block (worst month ever. I so wanted to create something and just…couldn’t), but my muse is pretty happy with the diverse projects, since I always have several going on and old…

Flip Side 3: The sequel nobody asked for. So the problem I had with this one was that I didn’t have a main problem. I had written Flip Side 1 and 2, and then I didn’t have a main problem to focus this book around, just a bunch of little problems, but…

Two thoughts before this excerpt. First, its inspiration. I was playing…a game (I am a bit of a gamer), and in the game, through what I had been dealing with, I thought I was going to raise the legendary hero to come and save everyone and that was going to be…

As mentioned in a previous post (See Dragon’s Guardian), this book actually inspired Kaylyn’s story. I had written most of Seyda’s story, until I wrote a throwaway line about Seyda reminding someone of the first Dragonrider. As I read that line, I…

This was my first dragon book that I wrote. Oftentimes my inspiration comes from two places: Dreams, and what if? Dreams are funny things. I don’t write down all my dreams. Some of them I roll over, open my laptop, and start typing out, and I can never quite get…

People (namely my students) ask me all the time, “How long does it take you write a book?” I’ll be honest, I don’t know. Mainly because I’m never working on just one. When I start, most ideas start out in my ‘random’ file,…

Authors are sane…really we are. I tell you this because when I say that we sometimes have arguments with characters…that we created…in our heads…and sometimes we lose those arguments…we are still sane. Raz and I had some arguments. If…

Funny enough, this wasn’t my first dragon book. It was the first I published, but not the first I wrote. It was actually inspired by a throwaway line from Seyda’s 2nd book. “The first Dragonrider was a female. You remind me very much of her.”…

Book 2: The Sequel (that went a little harder on romance than I intended) Chapter 1 New Mexico wasn’t known for its cool weather, but even I thought this was extreme. Only May, and already we were going for a record-breaking heat wave. The temperature was in the…

Here’s an excerpt: the first chapter of my very first book! Chapter 1 It was early May, and very warm out in New Mexico. In fact, the temperature was absolutely, miserably, hot. The world shimmered as the sun warmed the sidewalk to the point that it would fry an…