So how did this happen? Was it gained through hours and hours of graduate-level work, resulting in an obscure degree?

Nope.

(Although I do have a VERY obscure advanced degree, and some day I can tell you all about it.)

I learned to understand the English of Shakespeare as a kid, in the way kids learn any language: by being immersed in it. My dad was a high school English teacher who wanted to become better educated in his Shakespeare. Thus, when I was a baby, he and my mom began an every-summer habit of taking the fam to Ashland, Oregon to watch plays.

(Or, as the Elizabethans would have said, to “hear” plays.)

For several years, that meant date night(s) for my parents while my grandparents watched me and my younger sister. Children had to be five years old to attend performances. Mom and Dad waited for my younger sister to collect the correct number of birthdays, and thus I was newly seven by the time I attended my first Shakespeare play.

Do you know what seven-year-olds are really good at? Language acquisition.

Me, visiting Shakespeare’s ACTUAL school room.

In my case, I was a LANGUAGE-OBSESSED child. I loved words. I loved sentences. I loved repeating words, memorizing things, trying on new accents – “Words, words, words,” to borrow from a sad Danish prince given to monologuing.

For instance, when I was two, I learned that you could express the concept of “two-ness” in three distinct ways. You could hold up two fingers in answer to the question “How old are you?” Or you could spell it using sounds (tea-double you-oh). Or you could speak the word “two.” I have a memory of walking down the hallway repeating “t-w-o” over and over, just waiting for someone to ask me how old I was.

Anyway, back to being seven and going to a play for the first time.

Now, if I’m honest, I don’t know if I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead first or The Merchant of Venice. We watched both that fateful summer. But if you know the Stoppard play (R&G), you know his language is extremely complex, and at times, Elizabethan. It was basically like seeing 2 plays in this new language.

I. Was. Smitten.

I had not been told ahead of time that Shakespearean dialogue was challenging. Of course, when you’re seven, all adult conversation is challenging. So I just leaned forward (careful not to touch the wimples of the nuns seated in front of me even though I REALLY wanted to) and listened.

Intensely listened.

IIRC, my sister fell asleep, but me? I was there for it! And when Portia and Nerissa told their betrotheds a Big Fat Lie, I was there to call them on it.

Literally.

I said, “Liar” from my back-row seat in the Angus Bowmer Theater, which for its time was innovative in how it allowed small sounds to travel great distances.

First the nuns in front of me tittered. One turned and smiled, so I figured I wasn’t in too much trouble? Then the next row started laughing, and the next, and next, in this speedy ripple of laughter that made it all the way to the stage.

At this point, the actors broke character. They started laughing, leaned down, braced their hands on their tights-clad thighs, and laughed. My parents were too mortified (amused? shocked?) to say anything to me.

The actors collected themselves and the scene continued.

As an adult reader of Shakespeare, I have searched for the line that says, “We’ve been faithfully staying at home praying for your return,” but that line, as such, doesn’t exist. Which means I was relying on context to understand what was going on, and who was fibbing.

From that summer forward, I BEGGED my parents to take us back for more Shakespeare. I watched plays on TV. I found the volumes of Shakespeare in the Great Books of the Western World collection and started reading. The spelling! The language! The everything!

All this to say, if you have ever noted the little nods to the bard in every novel I write, now you know where it all started….

Recently, I got to enjoy my favorite day, a recurring day that only happens once every two years. (Very Marsian, right??)

On this Day of Days, I get to deliver the All About Will Shakespeare lecture, providing students some context for the cultural setting of his plays. I always include ask-me-anything time because it is fun to see if the students can stump me! (It’s rare and thrilling when it happens, because it is essentially permission to do MOAR RESEARCH. Special interests, baby!)

So there you have it: the story of Cidney and the New Language. Btw, if you’re a language/word/bard nerd too? I need to know this!

For now, to tweak a quote from the conclusion of a play I love: “[I] this way, you that.”

Do you know which play it’s from?

While I was at sea for my writing cruise, I reflected an awful lot on questions. The more I thought about it, the more I came to see that, as an author my job is all about moving a character, in a compelling way, from asking the wrong questions to asking the right questions.

Let’s look at an example. I’ll use my SAVING MARS series. That series has so many characters with whom I can contrast Jessamyn, my main character. We can take a quick look at three of the “contrast characters”: Harpreet, Ethan, and Kipper.

Harpreet doesn’t have much of a growth arc, because when we meet her, she’s already done the hard work of becoming who she was capable of becoming. She has, in essence, learned what the guiding question is for her life.  She faces her circumstances with this simple question, “Will it bring cheer or ease the burden of those around me?” From donating her precious store of tea in book one to refusing to be “rescued” from New Timbuktu prison in a later book, this query is her pole star.

Ethan, likewise, has done much of his work. He filters everything through this question: “Will it help the people of Mars?” In some ways, this makes him very similar to Kipper, although she has more of a growth arc, I would argue. So what is Kipper’s filtering question at the beginning of the series? Easy: “Will it help Mars Colonial?” There is a subtle difference between her question and Ethan’s. Ethan is more focused on individuals rather than “humanity.” Kipper’s growth arc consists of shifting from her question toward Ethan’s question. Her final act in the series comes from this shift. That is, she is able to act as she does because she has finally learned to care about individual Marsians, as opposed to the vaguer concept of “Mars Colonial.”

And this brings us to Jessamyn.

“Get me in a cockpit!”

In book one, she’s got a pretty basic question, which drives her forward through the first half-ish of the book. “Will it get me back in a cockpit?” Everything she does is about getting back in the air. After six books of growth and change, however, her final question becomes other-centered: “Will it save my people?” It is this question which leads her to walk straight into Lucca’s trap, knowing full well it is a trap, because trap-or-no, it is also the only way to save her people. Same person, different trajectory. You can even see it in the cover images!

So there you have it. If you are a writer and find yourself struggling to understand your character or to find their motivation, you might see if you can figure out what question guides their every move. And this might help you to figure out what trajectory you are most interested in sending them on!

“Imma walk into a trap!”

It would make me sound very cool if I said this was some sort of planned connectivity fasting period. It was not.

I most definitely did not plan to have my phone fall out of – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Three weeks ago, I rose very early in the morning to drive with Dr. Science up to Portland to catch a flight. We had a lovely empty-freeway drive and arrived in plenty of time for me to check my bags.

And that was where the trouble started.

It’s been awhile since I posted a pic of how I normally travel, but let’s just say that I never, never check bags, and that I’m very skilled at filling every square centimeter of my European-size carryon bag, even when I’ll be traveling for weeks on end.

This time, however, I had a little signing event to set up.

And that meant packing two suitcases that weighed … a lot. So Dr. Science sees a curbside check-in for Southwest and pulls up and we hand over my bags. And the sky-cap asks if I would like a printed boarding pass, and I think WHY NOT? How retro, how fun! A paper pass instead of using my phone!

So I say YES which means that when I go through TSA, it does not occur to me to whip out my phone. I just scan my (paper) boarding pass and I’m on my way.

It’s while I’m waiting at the gate that I realize I don’t have my phone. It takes me a good ten minutes to work up the courage to ask a total stranger if I could use their phone to call Dr. Science, and by this time he’s thirty-five minutes south of PDX and can’t get back to me before my plane leaves. But he confirms that, unfortunately, my phone is in the car, having fallen out of my pocket with neither of us noticing.

We agree I’ll catch my flight and figure out the phone situation later. (Seventy dollars later, as it turned out. But I digress.)

So what was it like not having a phone for three days?

My first taste of cell-phone-free me was when a fellow passenger on the flight came up to me and said, “Hi, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I heard you, and I just want to say that you are now my example of how to remain calm in a stressful situation.”

I smiled and thanked her, thinking: I’m calm. I’m so calm that complete strangers tell me I am their role model. Wow. Maybe this will be a super-cool Zen-like experience after all!

So. Was it amazing and calming and all those things that are supposed to happen when we unplug?

I’m sorry to confess that it was not. Not even a little. I needed OTP’s (one-time passwords) at least six times in the first 24 hours, and it only got worse as entities with which I needed to do business flat out refused when I couldn’t provide the OTP. I can only say that while it might be a peaceful and calming experience for some to be parted from their phones, I am NOT among their number.

So there you have it. Me, not chill, not soaking in the vacay from the digital world. At all.

I flew on Sunday and I got my phone back on Tuesday, and I was very, very, very happy.

Here’s a picture taken of me the moment UPS delivered the package.

So even though some people might have a great experience cutting the cord, well, the picture says it all.

Now, as for that signing event? It was all kinds of wonderful. I hadn’t done one since pre-Covid, and I’d forgotten how fun it could be to chat with new and old fans. <3

Wishing my American readers a very happy Thanksgiving, with exactly the amount of cell service that makes you calm and happy.

The answer is: a lot.

More than one or two. Or three. Or four. I am absolutely not one of those writers who can pound it out and get it right the first time. Nor am I one of those who can, by going at a snail’s pace, say what I want to say the first time I make the attempt. Fortunately, I actually like revision. Mostly.

For me, the steps go like this:

1) First draft: pretty much what it sounds like. This is where I get the bare bones of the story down.

2) Read the first draft (after stepping away for a week-ish) and decide that it is terrible. Like, really terrible. I probably shouldn’t even bother continuing.

3) Tell Dr. Science my dilemma, namely, that I have written dreck. (He tells me that I always say this, and that I should continue.)

4) Attack the story, looking for ways to make the dreck a little less awful. Change up a dull talking-heads scene into an action-packed, danger-laden scene. Repeat this a few times.

5) Attack the dialogue, trying to let my characters speak in their own voices, instead of in my (often pedantic) voice.

6) Ask Dr. Science to read it and give me notes, telling him that it is pretty awful and that he probably won’t like it, and that he might not even want to bother reading it.

7) Read Dr. Science’s extensive notes. Despair. Take heart. Begin another revision. Read the revision and decide it still needs work.

8) Revise again, changing key scenes, dropping huge chunks of writing that just. Isn’t. Working. I think cutting 24,000 words is my record?

9) Read the revision and conclude that I have lost the ability to tell a story well. Complain to Dr. Science, he of the long-sufferingitude, that I can’t tell a story anymore.

10) AFTER Dr. Science has talked me off the ledge, reminding me that I say this about EVERY book I have ever written, start revising again. (“Once more unto the breach!”)

11) At this point, I often start liking the story. And start seeing ways to make the action and suffering more compelling. I complete another thoroughgoing revision. Possibly an editor will see it and give thoughtful, inspiring notes. ;o) Which I act on.

12) Now I’m ready to edit on the sentence level. Does every sentence follow logically and clearly from the one that preceded it? Are there things I’ve left out that the reader will need to know? Is the romance sufficiently angsty while also remaining sweet and awkward and all the things a Cidney Swanson romance is known for?

13) FINALLY, I am ready to do a copyreading revision, searching for “the the,” overuse of “that,” overuse of adverbs, adjectives, and repetitious repeatings that readers don’t need because they are smart like that.

14) Proofread this final version. Then hand off to proofreader.

So that’s it, basically. Then, about 4-7 days later, I rouse myself from a stupor and start in all over again on the next book.

Honestly it is a miracle on the level of the Bernoulli Effect that any of my novels are ever published.  ]]> 0 Cidney Swanson https://cidneyswanson.com/?p=4176 2024-07-16T00:44:33Z 2024-07-16T00:44:33Z

I have a way of tidying up these (unnecessary) words that I’ve never heard anyone else suggest, and I want to share it.

Though I always try to remove the deadweight during one of the final revisions, I will often find myself with a larger word count than is ideal. Here’s how I tackle it: by deciding what final word count would make me happy, and evenly removing the words from each page.

That means that if I have an 85,000 word manuscript, and I want to get it down to 78,000, I will need to remove 7,000 words. If I have 365 pages, then I need to take out an average of 19 words per page.

I do this rigorously. If I have only removed 15 words, I start back at the top and look for 4 more. And here’s the thing: with VERY FEW exceptions, I can always find them. I keep track by writing the number on the back of the page I’ve just edited. If I found 19, I write “0” on the page. 25? I write “-6” because I have exceeded my number and removed 6 extra words. Yay! But if there is a page where the tension is already super tight, and I just can’t take out 19 words, I am okay removing what I can. If I remove 8 fewer than 19, I would be 11 words behind on my ideal count. So I would write either “+11” or if I were adding it to the previous “-6” page, I would write “+5” because I’m really only off by 5 excess words.

The amazing thing is that even when I’m sure a manuscript is tight, tight, tight, I can always find words I don’t need. The end result is a manuscript that is tighter, lighter, and cheaper to turn into a book. Yay!

This really hit home for me at a recent writing retreat, where an agent and an editor were both commenting on how they feel pressure to keep word counts low because of spiraling printing costs. (This would affect audiobook production as well, obviously. And copy edits and line edits and …. you get the idea.)

Here are the quick and dirty ones you can look for:

• Create contractions for EVERYONE who would speak with contractions. (Could’ve for could have)
• 20 years becomes “decades”
• in five hundred years = “in five centuries”
• finding out = “learning”
• it does not matter = “it’s irrelevant”
• I grab a Frisbee and send it sailing toward her = I send a Frisbee sailing toward her
• Get rid of adverbs! “my arms snake tightly…” = “my arms snake”
• Get rid of modifiers in general! “says my mom” = “says Mom”

I hope this helps anyone who has a too-high word count. Er, make that “wordy manuscript”!

(Got a go-to? Share it in the comments!)

I’m writing this down in hopes it will inspire anyone needing that push to keep trying for success on a difficult task/project/dream. If you’ve seen the video about making The Wedding Gown for the daughterling, then you know I met the deadline and gave my daughter a gown that was absolutely perfect for her. It wasn’t a huge challenge, because I have the background in pattern-making and costume design. I started patterning in December and slowly worked my way through sourcing fabric, perfecting the fit of the pattern in a “muslin” (fake fabric), buying and cutting the real fabric, sewing the gown, cutting up the lace embellishment, mosaic-ing the lace pieces to fit onto her bodice, embroidering crystal beads and pearls onto the lace, and attaching the lace to the gown. I would do about an hour’s worth of lace embroidery each night watching TV. (Inspector Lewis, Endeavor, and Upstart Crow, mainly.)

As July 6th drew near, I knew I would finish her gown in time, so I started thinking about my own Mother-of-the-Bride gown. I had maybe a month to go till the wedding. I didn’t think I wanted to make my dress, but once I went to stores, I realized I DID want to make it myself. So I went to Joann and found possible fabrics and then went home to try to make a pattern I liked.

I decided to make a full “muslin” dress for myself, since I wanted to be sure I liked the shape before committing to buying spendy fabric. I wanted a stretch fabric, so I couldn’t use actual muslin, which doesn’t stretch. Instead I used this old printed knit from my kid’s clothing business days, green with blue tree frogs all over it.

I patterned it, cut it, sewed it, and tried it on.

Ugh. Not even.

The problem wasn’t the tree frog fabric; it was the fit of the garment. I felt super yucky in this design. Not the feeling I was going for. At first I thought, well, that’s it. I have to buy something off the rack. Hmm . . . what stores can I hit up next? But when I tried (again) to find a gown in stores, I failed, again. Fine. Maybe I could try another style of pattern?

After searching all my closets for styles I had worn and liked in the past, I chose a dress that had belonged to my great grandmother Pearl, circa 1960, and decided this was it! Retro-chic and flattering. So I started from scratch again, copying the pattern off the actual dress and making another mock-up muslin, this time in slinky woven polyester. When I tried on this new muslin, it was even worse than the tree-frog disaster.

Now what was I going to do? The wedding was in two weeks. I hit the mall again and found two possible dresses at Macy’s, and I brought them home. Neither was really right, though, and as Wedding Week approached, I got more and more unhappy thinking of how the pictures from the wedding would show me wearing a dress I didn’t like.

The problem was, I’d already failed twice to make something for myself. I decided to try one final time, because really, what did I have to lose? I would go with a simpler pattern this time, and see how far I could get. Meanwhile I’d found a fabric that I was completely head-over-heels about, so that gave me a bit more motivation.

I cut and sewed my THIRD muslin, and managed to pin, cut, and adjust the front pretty well for a good fit, but I couldn’t reach around my back, obviously. Enter Dr. Science. I showed him the part of the muslin that wasn’t fitting well in back. He agreed. “Yup, that isn’t fitting well. What do you want me to do about it?” It took a few minutes and a small compact mirror held over my shoulder in front of the bathroom mirror, but I finally managed to explain to Dr. Science how to pin the not-fitting part so that it would fit more smoothly.

It took two more muslins to get the fit just right. (Off the shoulder is a little trickier than on.) But the third time I got it! My pattern fit beautifully! I was ready to go! I started cutting and sewing. The wedding was in five days, and believe me, I had more things to do than just sit and sew. But, by keeping at it, a little here a little there, I managed to finish the gown in time.

It is my all-time, favorite gown/dress/anything that I have ever worn. I came so close to giving up and buying a dress I didn’t like, and I’m soooooo glad I didn’t. How many favorite dresses do you really get in a lifetime? (My last one was a dress made by my grandmother Dorothy when I was six or seven. Emerald green taffeta covered with all-over lace.) Thank goodness I didn’t give up.

I started by saying that I was writing this in hopes it might inspire others to keep going on hard projects, but maybe I’m just writing it so I don’t forget the lesson myself. Fail all you need to—just don’t quit.

Skip forward to 2012. I now love flying. I’m still able to recall my fears, and occasionally they rear their ugly hydra heads, but mostly I love it. I write my MARS SERIES, about a girl who loves to pilot. Skip ahead to 2015: I’m ready to fully remember and inhabit my old fears, and I start writing a story about a girl who is so afraid of flying she won’t board a plane.

 Fast forward to Spring Break 2018. Some awesome friends offer to fly me and Dr. Science (DH) to the Bahamas! Yay! We load and board their little Cessna 310 four-seater in Ft. Pierce, Florida and take off into a beautiful Sunday sky. We’re all wearing headsets, so we hear everything the tower and our pilot friend say. How cool! As we circle orange groves and lakes, up past a thousand feet, then two, then three, I find myself thinking, “Oh my gosh! I get it! I understand why Jessamyn would rather be flying, all day, all the time. Why would you do anything else if you could do this?” (We’ll just chalk up Cidney having thoughts about imaginary people to the fact that writers are a bit … well, you fill in the blank.)

At this point I should probably mention that there were a few questions it hadn’t occurred to me to ask about this plane. (1) Can it fly if one of the propellers stops spinning? And (2) can it land safely if one of the propellers stops spinning? (Do you sense where this is going?) 

So we’re about to head out over the Atlantic for our quick one hour crossing when the pilot’s wife, seated beside me, points to some brown liquid spewing off the left wing locker. Now, the pilot is a little busy at this point, doing things like checking instruments, contacting the tower, and generally trying to ensure we all live to tell the story. Meanwhile, here’s me: I’m looking out the left window and the prop stops spinning. Stops. Spinning. I don’t know a lot about aerodynamics, but I know that left prop does something something something LIFT something something NOT CRASH.

It takes our friend about ninety seconds to do all the things he needs to do before he finally gets a minute to tell me and Dr. Science that it is perfectly fine to land a plane with only one engine.

Long story short, we make it to the ground just fine. It was reassuring that the tower kept asking us if we would require ground assistance (read: ambulances and fire trucks), but it was WAY more reassuring that our pilot friend kept saying, “No, I think we’ll be fine.”

Now, if I had been able to see into the future back when I was flight-phobic, I would have said to future me: Wow! That must have taken so much courage! And it did. Riding that plane down 4500 feet took a fair bit of my daily supply of courage. I didn’t panic, although my heart was pounding harder than I knew it could pound until our friend reassured us the plane could land despite the propeller, you know, NOT SPINNING. But that was a very passive sort of courage. I didn’t have a choice about being there or not. My “courage” was mostly the courage to sit tight and not panic.

 After we returned to the hanger, Dr. Science and our pilot friend went looking for the oil leak, found the oil leak, and did some testing to be sure it was done leaking. And that’s when I really got the chance to, in Shakespeare’s words, “screw my courage to the sticking point.” Did I have it in me to get back inside that Cessna?

I’m grateful to report the answer was yes. I had three hours to keep asking myself if I was sure, but the answer didn’t change. Whatever doubts I may have had about “am I REALLY over my flying phobia?” were pretty much settled that day. I got back on that plane. I buckled in. Put in the headphones—the same ones over which I’d heard the words “oil leak” and “emergency assistance” and the rest of it. I got in and I flew to the Bahamas like a boss.

And the Bahamas themselves?

Within a few hours of arriving I was crying over our anticipated departure. I didn’t want to leave, ever. I took picture after picture, and when I got home I made some jewelry to remind me of the incredible turquoise seas, the astonishing star-filled skies.

If any of you have a “I got back on that horse” story, why not share it below? I’ll enter you for a chance to win the Bahamas pendant.

]]> 5 Cidney Swanson https://cidneyswanson.com/?p=2431 2017-09-25T17:53:33Z 2017-09-25T17:47:34Z

This is NOT Edmund, but it might’ve been his teacher!

First off, writing time travel fiction involves research. Lots of research. Books. Internet. Museums. Rinse and repeat. All those activities informed my writing of Edmund and his world in A Thief in Time.

But in another way, writing Edmund was a job I began preparing for when I was just seven. That was the year I saw my first two Elizabethan-era dramas onstage. I don’t remember which I saw first—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or The Merchant of Venice—but I was at that golden age of language acquisition, and I soaked up the thees and thous and cansts and wherefores just like they were any other new-to-me words uttered by adults addressing other adults. I was smitten by the rhythm and sound of all those delicious words, chewing them like Halloween candy long after the weekend of play-going was over.

At that age, I wasn’t old enough to understand that Shakespeare (or Stoppard) wrote “difficult” plays using “complex” language. Are you kidding me? When you’re seven, everything an adult says is laced with confusion and must be parsed and interpreted using visual cues, tone of voice, and the occasional dictionary consultation. (Try finding “sooth” in any dictionary dispensed to seven year olds.)

Not long after hearing those plays, I noticed that my grandfather used this same toothsome language when he read to us from his King James Version of the Bible. Elizabethan and Jacobean English quickly became as comprehensible to me as any other form of English. For a kid addicted to the texture and flavor of words, this stuff was Nirvana.

While I was still young enough that my parents made me go to bed before Anne Boleyn’s head was struck off (The Six Wives of Henry VIII), I continued to receive regular doses of the English spoken in the 16th century, returning to Ashland, Oregon’s bard fest for even more Shakespeare during my 11th, 12th, and 13th summers. Well, at that point the deal was sealed for me. Shakespeare nerd for life.

In college, I enrolled in not one but two programs that sent me to the UK to watch—wait for it—Shakespeare! (And his contemporaries! And more Stoppard!) After that, I married Dr. Science, a guy equally interested in geeking out over Shakespeare. We were the honeymooners who skimped on lodging and camped throughout the UK to save money for important things. We spent a boggling £250 on plays in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. (Hey, that was twice our monthly rent at the time!)

Fast-forward to my more recent writerly life. Dr. Science and I returned to Stratford-upon-Avon twice in the past four years, spending as much time as possible visiting sites associated with Shakespeare. His house. His wife’s house. His school. His church. The hall where his dad was a magistrate. His mother’s family’s farmstead. All these buildings are still standing today. And some of them are in operation or are run as “living history” museums, where you can see how bread was made in the Elizabethan era or practice penmanship seated at desks that have survived five centuries of students.

When it came to the actual writing, obviously I held back on period-correct language, but probably the most fun part of writing Thief was figuring out the places where I could sneak in some “language.” Hopefully it wasn’t too distracting for those who don’t relish chewy language! So there you have it, my report on “How I Wrote the Character Edmund.” Really, it was child’s play.

Are there any remnants of childhood geekery in your job or pastimes? I’d love to hear in the comments!

P.S. In case you wondered, “Shaftesbury” is a nod to the tiny lane in London’s theatre district. Because I’m the author and I can.

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When self-publishing burst into my awareness in 2011, I decided to go that direct-to-reader route, and I’ve never been sorry. I love this method of publishing. I am doing what I always wanted to do: making a living as a writer. I’ve loved it so much that I pretty much shelved the idea of being published by, you know, a publisher.

But then Amazon came knocking.

And how could I not be excited about that?? So, long story short, I’m super excited to announce that Amazon has bought A THIEF IN TIME for re-release August 8th, 2017 under their Kindle Press imprint. It’s been wonderful working with the team at Kindle Press, including the part where they convinced me to address my possible overuse of hyphens, italics, and ellipses. (Other awesome copy editors and proofreaders have nudged me this direction. I guess I just felt more responsibility to stop my wicked ways now that a publisher besides me will have their name associated with the title.) Anywhooo, I was realizing this week that this, really, was my childhood dream coming true. Ha! What do ya’ know?

Over the next couple weeks, I thought it would be fun if I shared some of the behind-the-scenes stuff that went into writing A Thief in Time, so look for that in your inbox (or here) soon. I’ll cover the research trips I made, how and why I decided to have characters from the past visit the present instead of the other way around, and how my personal life as a resident of Montecito and an art student colored the setting. I can’t wait to share all of this with you!

Meanwhile, I’m celebrating the upcoming re-release with a mini teaser/trailer and something dark chocolate. Only one of these is shareable. What d’ya think?