Candles, Cozies, and Lemon Chess Pie: Things I’m Grateful for This Autumn

Posted on November 23, 2023 ·

Image by Vassilis lappas from Pixabay

Gratitude is something I strive to practice daily, but in the spirit of November I thought I’d make a list of things I am especially grateful for this autumn.

Family

Of course, family comes first. In a year that’s seen my daughter move out and my son begin driving himself to school, I’m more aware than ever of the invaluable moments that make up a mother’s life, and I cherish every one.

Writing

There’s less time for writing than there used to be, but that just makes me appreciate it more. I’m grateful for the stories that still whisper their secrets to me and for the memories that wait patiently until I find the right words.

Friendship

My critique partner Carrie has been there for me for over a decade. We hold each other accountable in weekly emails, exchanging stories and sharing our struggles and triumphs, and I am so grateful to have her in my life.

Teaching

For many years I was a practicing nurse, and although I was good at my job, I never loved it. Now that I’m teaching, I’m amazed that I ever did anything else. Whether preschool or middle school, education is where I belong.

Candles

It’s important to appreciate the little things in life, and little gives me more simple pleasure than holiday-themed candles. This autumn I’ve been indulging in the warm scents of Pumpkin Carving and Movie Night Cocoa.

Lemon Chess Pie

I quit sugar four years ago, but I still love baking sweet treats for my family. Lemon chess pie has become an autumn staple; it’s not officially Thanksgiving until our home is filled with the sweet smells of buttery pie crust and freshly grated lemon zest.

Hogwarts Legacy

Going back to simple pleasures, after spending a day managing 11- and 12-year olds, there’s nothing like cheerfully casting Crucio on an armored mountain troll. I bought a PS5 solely for the privilege of playing this game, and it’s been worth every penny.

Cozy Mysteries

My go-to guilty pleasure, cozies are short and sweet and laugh-out-loud funny. The latest in my favorite series came out in October, but I saved it for Thanksgiving Break so I could relax and read in long stretches on my sunny porch.

Right about now, that sounds like a good idea.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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A Few of My Favorite October Stories

Posted on October 17, 2023 ·

(A version of this post appeared in The Faerie Review in 2022)

‘Tis the season for ghosts and goblins, misty graveyards, and haunted houses. When long summer days are overtaken by autumn darkness there’s nothing like curling up with a good October story, so in honor of Halloween month, here are a few of my favorites:

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

No one writes October stories quite like Ray Bradbury. The celebrated fantasy and horror author famously loved Halloween month, a fondness he indulged in books like The Halloween Tree, The October Country, and my personal favorite, Something Wicked This Way Comes. Reading Bradbury’s dark fantasy about a sinister traveling carnival spreading evil in a small Illinois town is like falling into a dream. The story is told in prose that’s more like poetry, rich with the warm hues of autumn and a deep hypnotic dread.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Written like a classic Victorian ghost story, this Gothic tale embraces requisite tropes of the genre: an isolated house shrouded in fog and ruin, a mysterious figure lurking in a graveyard, phantom cries that can only be heard at night. Wrapped in a Christmas memory, the story does take a while to warm up, but once the haunting begins it pulls you along in a slow luxury of terror. A perfect October read.

“Children of the Corn” by Stephen King (from short story collection Night Shift)

The 1984 movie adaptation of Stephen King’s classic October story was a favorite of mine as a teenager. I loved it so much, when my high school sweetheart said he had family in the little town of Salix, Iowa, where part of the movie was filmed, I immediately suggested a road trip. Unlike the film, the short story is bereft of sentiment and does not end well for our main characters. This version is as much a grim portrayal of a failing marriage and the cruelties we become capable of inflicting on those with whom we’ve fallen out of love as a story of supernatural evil.

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

This absolute gem of a young adult novel is set in winter but is 100% an October story. Suma, with her hazy, languid prose, skillfully weaves a tapestry of missing teenage girls whose stories haunt the main character, Lauren, in ghostly visions and terrible dreams. Lauren becomes further estranged from her real-life relationships as she’s pulled deeper into the psychic mysteries of these lost girls. A mesmerizing story with a shock of an ending that somehow works.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…” Ah, what better first line to lure a reader into the sublime gothic nightmare that is Rebecca? Fraught with mystery and dread, this slow burn of a novel settles into your bones like the chill of autumn itself. The isolation and fear that Daphne du Maurier creates for her unnamed protagonist, and the bleak, ominous atmosphere of the estate of Manderley where she is haunted, combine to grip the reader in a dark and gloomy embrace. Pure October horror.

Enjoy the season, everyone, and happy reading!

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Fall into Reading and the Linden Way Blog Tour

Posted on September 24, 2022 ·


Happy autumn, everyone! I am so excited for this season. After three years I can finally take my fall workshop again (it just wouldn’t have been the same on Zoom); my blog tour for The House on Linden Way kicked off this week and continues throughout October; and I’m part of a new Women on Writing giveaway called Fall into Reading, because what better way to celebrate any occasion than with FREE books?!

Click here for more information on the Fall into Reading giveaway, which includes 16 books (one of which should look familiar!), various other prizes, and a $150 Amazon gift card.

On to Linden Way! All of the dates for the blog tour are listed below; there are 22 stops over six weeks featuring reviews, spotlights, articles, and interviews. I’ll post a weekly roundup here so that you don’t miss a thing.

In Monday’s interview on Women on Writing, I talked about the journey of writing Linden Way, the truth in my fiction, and the differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing.

On Thursday I was over at Deborah Adam’s blog with a piece called “Exploring Our Deepest Fears Through Speculative Fiction.” 

And on Friday The House on Linden Way was in the spotlight on The Faerie Review.

That’s it for this week! See you soon, and thank you all for your continued support.

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Autumn Days Are Here Again

Posted on September 22, 2020 ·

Photo by Kristian Seedorff on Unsplash

The summer felt like it would never end, but finally it’s candle weather again. In August I penned a Halloween-themed middle grade book featuring a haunted house, a creepy corn maze, and a graveyard where the skeletons come to life. It was crazy fun to write and teleported me straight into the spooky season like a time machine. Books, whether you’re reading them or writing them, are magic like that.

While the draft of Halloween Eternal sits in a dark corner waiting for my return (I can feel, right now, the weight of its sinister glare), I am working on a final edit for a cozy mystery I wrote last fall. That book features a wintry mountain town, a delightful ice cream parlour, and, of course, a dead body. In the tradition of cozies, there are more giggles than gore, and the only explicit descriptions are of desserts.

As for The House on Linden Way, my adult novel about a woman who visits her childhood home and becomes trapped in living memories, I am still out on submission. I told myself I would query agents for a year and then switch to small publishers. My year runs out in December, but so far I’ve received three requests for fulls and one partial that I sent out last week. So maybe there is hope; after all, what better time for an agent to fall in love with a melancholy ghost story than the shadowy days of autumn?

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My Accidental Fall Tradition

Posted on September 30, 2019 ·

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

Fall has finally arrived, and with it, a few of my favorite things: cool mornings, autumn scents, sweaters and boots, Halloween. No one really needs an excuse for bingeing on ghost stories for an entire month, but the long nights of October provide one anyway.

Another fall tradition I look forward to is Mothers Who Write, a ten-week writing workshop that I stumbled upon in 2011 and have taken nearly every year since. Before then, when I was still an unpublished author scribbling mostly in secret, I had no writing community and no idea what I was missing.

Mothers Who Write is structured so participants draft a two-page piece every week to a prompt, then read the piece aloud the following week for critique. There’s a deep level of trust involved with sharing our stories, but even more so when those stories are still being written. In the early stages of drafting, we know our ideas are imperfect, our sentences messy, our words unrefined—but in a room where we are all equally vulnerable, we share them anyway.

And by November, we’ve shared plenty of other things too: lots of laughter, a few tears, some pie recipes, and—because we’re mothers—probably pictures of our children. I’ve met so many extraordinary women in that class.

I’ve also come to embrace the form of flash fiction and essays. Having a 2-page limit forces you to pare a story down to its essence, and there’s an increasing market for works of brevity like these. Of the dozens of pieces I’ve written in Mothers Who Write, eleven have gone on to publication, and all three of my publications this year were started in workshop last fall.

One is a fictional story about a girl struggling through adolescence, one is an essay about a failed attempt to reconnect with my mother, and one is a reflection on my son’s tendency toward nostalgia and his ambivalence about growing older.

The best writing workshops are filled with a sense of anticipation, familiarity, and belonging. Just like the best traditions of fall.

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New Season, New Stories

Posted on September 22, 2017 ·

Yesterday was officially the last day of summer, although for me summer ended six weeks ago when my kids returned to school. I miss having them home, and I miss long sleepy mornings and indulgent late nights filled with movie marathons, sprints to the 24-hour donut shop, and endless reading.

Now mornings begin with an alarm clock and evenings end with math homework and ten-minutes-till-lights-out warnings. But there are definite advantages to the school year: it’s easier to meet my writing goals, stick with a healthy diet, and schedule time to work out. I love walking my son to school every morning. And, of course, the weather eventually turns, like it did earlier this week.

Fall is here—jeans and sweaters, autumn-spiced candles, fresh-baked pies. Halloween displays in the grocery store and the return of cool evenings that melted away in June. Soon they will turn cold, and that’s fine too. There will be more movie marathons—first scary ones, and then Christmas ones. There will be more books. And there will be more writing.

Although I’ve been quiet on here, I have kept busy this year, drafting new short stories and essays and making pretty good progress on a maybe-novel (I’m calling it that until it reaches the 50,000-word mark—too often my novel ideas end up long short stories).

One of my new pieces, called “From Autumn to June,” was accepted at YARN magazine for publication next year. And one of my short essays, or maybe it’s more of a poem, was published this week in Mothers Always Write.

That piece, called “Sometime After Thirteen,” is a tribute to my now 15-year-old daughter; I read it aloud at a Mother’s Day reading in May with my daughter in attendance, and I was honored to have it appear in such a lovely magazine so that I could share it with you, too. I hope you read it, and I hope you all had a wonderful summer and are looking forward to fall as much as I am!

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