As we start the last month of the third quarter, my challenge is to help each of you, my characters, make sure your part of the story delivers to its year-end manuscript completion goals. This is a critical point in…
Cheryl Bostrom’s SUGAR BIRDS is an immersive exploration of loss, redemption, and coming of age in the breathtaking Pacific Northwest wilderness. After accidentally setting a tragic fire, ten-year-old Aggie runs to the woods her father taught her to navigate, where…
Susan Schoenberger’s Liability of Love explores themes of class conflict, grief, trauma, and ultimately depicts how the stories we tell ourselves have the potential to both wreck us and save us. Kirkus Reviews calls it, “a keenly observed, compassionate, and…
In P. J. Vernon‘s Bath Haus, Oliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they’ve made…
“Society cannot exist,” the philosopher Edmund Burke cautioned, without “a controlling power upon will and appetite…men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” A similar warning may reside in The Rock Eaters, Brenda Peynado’s beautifully bizarre…
In 1993, Jeff Arch’s screenplay Sleepless in Seattle became a hit movie, won him an Academy Award nomination, and launched a thirty-year career writing for films. For most of those years, though, Jeff was haunted by a story that insisted…