In Jewish tradition, this month before the High Holy Days is called Elul. It is a time of reflection, a time to think about the past year, ponder manners in which one may have “missed the mark” and which one now regrets. Harvey Jones, the main character in my debut series, the Cantabria American School novels, is …
Category: Writing
Brujas newsflash
One of the fun things you can do is play around using the words you’ve slaved over for so many years and plug them into a program called Wordle, which will mix them up and represent them in randomly colored shapes based on word-count. So, in honor of autumn, which is upon us with its …
Thank you, Lauren Sapala!
Knock me over with a feather! I’ve got a wonderful success story to share with you today. It begins late in 2013, during the final stages of writing The Cantabria American School series. The editor I had hired had sent me a huge list of issues that needed to be addressed, (rightly so), providing me with no …
The “My Writing Process” Blog Tour
This is cool: I’ve been asked to participate in the “My Writing Process” blog tour by my friend and fellow author, Moore Bowen. Please check out her blog. Thank you, Moore, for inviting me to jump onto the #MyWritingProcess blog tour. The questions are the same for everyone on this tour. What am I working …
Bueno: a journey
Over the last few months I’ve learned that there are many steps in the path I’ll call “getting my book out there.” Before I could even begin, there were the hurdles of actually publishing it: completing the manuscript, getting the cover design right, proofing, submitting it in the format required (especially tricky for the Kindle …
Bueno, released on February 5th, 2014
Bueno is the first book in the Cantabria American School series. Have you ever been in a work environment where your colleagues put stumbling blocks in front of you at every turn? Welcome to Harvey Jones’s world. Harvey goes to Spain to work as an interim headmaster at a small private school. …
Choosing names
One of the many fun things about writing a novel is the opportunity to choose every character’s name. In my high school literature class, the wonderful Mrs. Quammen often harped on about the fact that authors actually put thought and care into selecting names for their characters. But, honestly, I never really believed it. To …
What do eating corn on the cob, doing puzzles and writing novels have in common?
Well, for me, a lot. Let’s begin with corn on the cob. On a warm fall day, my second year at college, sitting at the dining hall table eating rice—just kidding—eating corn on the cob, a friend turned to me and said, “Christy, I have never seen anyone eat corn on the cob the way …