Here are a few sights Annie Friesen might have seen when she first discovered Westcliffe, Colorado in Accidentally Amish. Can you picture Rufus walking these streets? Thank you for the many kind reviews and messages I’ve been receiving. It’s exciting for me to see how many people feel the collision of cultures in the story […]
Probably you have more exciting things to do on a Friday night. Me? I’ve been running around like a headless chicken for the last four hours. Pay the bills. Pow-wow with daughter about a project she wants help on. Trip to Target for the glamorous stuff we all have to buy. Stop for food on […]
Where do stories start? For me, stories begin with characters. As a writer, a character is likely to pop up in my brain first, then a setting. After that I need the elements of plot—an objective, obstacles, stakes that keep rising. As a reader, also, I tend to attach to a character before I start […]
It’s my brother’s birthday. I would say my “little brother,” but he’s not that much younger. I am one of seven kids and am squashed between a couple of brothers so closely that, as a parent, I have many times wondered what in the world my parents were thinking. Besides, I have another brother who […]
I get an F in reading. You probably do too. I read lots of books. And blogs. And magazines. And online articles. (Newspapers, not so much.) And I get an F. We’ve turned into a culture of scanners. We might read the first two or three lines of a piece of writing. After that, we […]
Six years and it’s over. Six years ago a church in my neighborhood began holding a worship service on Saturday evening. I knew it was a traditional church steeped in liturgy, and the Saturday gathering would be identical to two Sunday morning services. I decided I could use a regular dose of tradition. It was […]
I am mired in edits and suggestions and tweaks and rewrites. I’m not complaining, mind you. All this work means books in process, and that is what I’m aiming for, after all. I’ve been going back and forth with one editor on changes to In Plain View, the sequel to Accidentally Amish, which just released. […]
What would you do? I frequently spend about four hours in a local coffee shop on Saturday mornings writing or revising. In four hours a lot of people come and go and most of them are just background buzz. But a couple of weeks ago, a group of four friends came in and set […]
It’s too bad I’m not better about celebrating. I’m one of those people who just does the next thing that needs doing. In May I released The Pursuit of Lucy Banning, the first in the Avenue of Dreams series. I think I mopped the kitchen floor that day. Although a couple weeks later I got […]
