Frequently Asked Questions

Where do you get your ideas?

From a small factory in Idaho. They’re delivered to my front door every morning. I sit down with a cup of coffee, open up a fresh idea and write a brilliant chapter. All before 7 a.m! Well, not quite...

Writing is certainly more of a struggle than that, but finding ideas is not.

They’re everywhere.

On any given day, ideas might fly into my head while I am:

listening to music
standing in line to order lunch
driving
washing the dishes
reading an article
showering
asleep and dreaming
walking my dogs
spying

Did you always want to be a writer?

No, I wanted to dig ditches. Seriously...

Yes. From the time I could first grip a fat pencil and put crooked words on paper, I’ve been a writer. But it took me a very long time to become an author.

If you write, you are a writer.

Moving from writer to author means that someone in the publishing industry believes in your book enough to take a chance on it. To this minute, I am amazed and grateful that I can call myself an author. But even if my book contract disappeared tomorrow, I would still be a writer.

How did you get published?

I sold my first-born to a shady character who promised me a book deal. Shh, don’t tell anyone. Actually, no...

I did it the hard way.

I wrote, got rejected, wrote some more, and got rejected some more. Finally I wrote a manuscript that earned me representation by an agent.

I wrote two novels in four years. As I was collecting rejections, I went to a national writing conference in New York, joined a critique group, met lots of other writers online, and learned as much as I could about the craft of writing. I relied on support from family, friends, and my online writing community to keep me going.

During the fifth year, I thought about NOT writing. But I have to write. I can’t give it up. I did consider giving up the submission process, however. I thought I would write just for fun, not publication.

I wrote a third novel, revised it many times, and sent it out to agents and editors. This book seemed … well, better than the previous two, so I figured I would try one more time to see if someone wanted to publish it.

And we all lived happily ever after!

Why did you write FLASH BURNOUT from the perspective of a teenage boy?

The main character refused to shut up until I did. You want to know the real reason?...

I’ve been boy-crazy since the age of twelve. I have spent decades staring at, listening to, laughing with, and fretting over boys of every age. I’ve had lots of male friendships, but only one true love. I’ve been able to study him up close for many years. Now we’re raising a boy.

I think perhaps all of that intense focus on the opposite sex might have given me some insight into the male psyche, because Blake’s voice was so real while I wrote that I sometimes felt I was transcribing his story, rather than making it up as I went along. My inner boy is strong! It remains to be seen whether or not readers will believe him, but I was gratified when my editor told me that some of her colleagues didn’t realize I was a woman when they read the book.