Category: Author Real Life
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Pride, Pursuit, and Pictures
It’s just over a year since I released Pride and Pursuit, my most recent Pride and Prejudice variation, a caper wherein Darcy steals a carriage… with Elizabeth Bennet inside! On the run for their lives, they need to put personal differences aside as they make all haste for the one place Darcy thinks they will…
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Orwell Nailed It
#PrideAndPerjury #JAFF #HistoricalFiction #SelfPublishing “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” George Orwell First, please note what Orwell did not say. Writing is often intensely enjoyable – even non-fiction. It’s when your enjoyable project turns into a judgeable, sellable, editable book that the illness kicks in… My…
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Austen Friendships
In the past few months, I have been thinking about relationships, particularly friendships. Each of us has groups of friends. Some of them we met through family; some at church, school, or work; and others through our interests. Some friend groups crossover and some have never met. There are those friends that we attend specific…
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City Caro, Country Lizzy
Happy October, dear readers! In North America, autumn is upon us, and most of us associate this month with harvest time. It is likewise the month the Netherfield party arrives in Meryton. I feel like continuing one of my favourite themes: Bingley sister bashing! An aspect of the much be-hated Superior Sisters I failed to…
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Paths Retraced: Travels and an Anthology
As I write this post, I’m still dusting the final vestiges of jet lag from my shoulders, almost but not quite back into the routine and—yes—time zone of my normal, everyday life. We returned just a week ago from another visit to the United Kingdom. We were there to help my daughter settle into her…
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Song of Pemberley
In 2021 I started a novel called ‘Song of Pemberley’ but never finished it. Between selling my house in Texas, packing up everything and moving to Illinois, a number of things fell to the wayside until lately. Now, I’m working on playing catchup, and you know how much fun that is. However, since I am…
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Ghostwriting and Other Gory Tales
Ghostwriting, and other gory tales ‘Though I prefer first-rate fiction, for the last few years my reading seems to have been concentrated on letters and journals and biographies. It doesn’t bother me to read while I am writing… I mean, I don’t suddenly find another writer’s style seeping out of my pen. Though once, during…
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Vertigo in the Regency
In January of this year, after having 4 barometric migraines in 5 days, I found myself on the floor in my library, vomiting into the trash bin. For the next two weeks, I was told I had positional vertigo, but they didn’t want to treat it beyond medications to control the dizziness and nausea until…
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Stitches in Time
Good morrow, dear readers! How are you this fine September morn? This week, we shall address what I learned of clothing during our time with the Amish and how that pertains to life in the Regency period. One of my biggest pet peeves with the 1995 Pride and Prejudice adaptation is their choice to deem…
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All The World’s A Stage
We just returned home from our second visit of the summer to the Stratford Festival here in Ontario to end the summer with a celebration of theatre. This time, it was all Shakespeare! The festival—being in a place called Stratford, which is most conveniently on the River Avon—concentrates on The Bard’s works, and has a…