I was supposed to take yesterday off. I have been feeling the need for a "Mental Health Day." A day to recharge my drained creative batteries. The plan was to drive to Ohio's Amish Country for lunch with our cousins. Do some shopping. Enjoy a quiet day off-grid.  Then I saw the weather forecast. Ninety-plus degrees combined with high humidity is not a pleasant setting for walking from shop to shop. We postponed our lunch date to a yet-to-be-determined point on the summer calendar. Besides, we have dense smoke from the Canadian wildfires and are under a stage red air quality alert, which occasionally wanders into code purple. It's bad, but I won't complain. How horrible must it be in Canada??? Stay safe, my northern friends. All of this goes to illustrate how plans change. Sometimes the change is sudden and unexpected as when Kensi Kitty became deathly ill just prior to the Pennwriters Conference. My husband was also sick, but less so. I made a quick decision to ca...

I was a teenager when Emergency! first hit the air, and I never missed an episode. My enthusiasm went far beyond having a crush on Johnny Gage AKA Randolph Mantooth. Following the paramedics of LA Fire Station 51 for the next few years sparked a career choice that had a far-reaching impact on my life.  It started with taking a CPR class. Not long after I graduated from high school, I signed up for emergency medical training and eventually became an EMT on my local ambulance service.  Fast forward a few decades. I had retired from that first career and moved on through several others, but I still carried a passion for the adrenaline rush of lights and sirens. I channeled that passion into my writing and created a character named Zoe Chambers, a paramedic on a small-town ambulance service.  Thirteen Zoe Chambers novels later (and a total of 19 novels), here I am, in a place where I doubt I would be had it not been for Emergency! and Randy Mantooth.   I always ho...

Every writer I know has two favorite words.  The End I typed them yesterday. This is the manuscript I have dubbed the Frankenbook. It's a standalone mystery/thriller. At least, in my mind, it's a standalone. I've been working on it for YEARS. Writing. Re-writing. Tearing apart. Copying and pasting.  It's still a hot mess, but it has a beginning, a middle, and THE END.  Today and tomorrow, I will revise a chunk of pages, which I'll send to my critique group on Sunday. Then, I'm putting it aside for a few weeks to focus on a short story I've been asked (strongly encouraged) to write.  The funny thing is, I've no clue what this short story would be about, but within an hour of typing THE END on the Frankenbook, a premise came to me along with a character name and an opening paragraph.   My muse can only deal with one first draft at a time.