Category: News stories

Roberts ES students always have such good questions!

Today was the 6th time media specialist extraordinaire Tiffanie Lifsey invited me to speak with her fifth grade students in Suwanee Georgia!

There were a lot of budding writers in the audience and many questions focused on that. For example, what does my editing process look like before I send a manuscript to the publisher? How many times in all does a manuscript for a novel go through editing? I think they were shocked by the answer.

There were also questions about the real people behind various characters, but this was the first time I was asked about how I researched for the character of Officer Schmidt, who made appearances in both Making Bombs and The War Below.

This is one of the classes at Roberts ES. I think there were 6 in all.
I love this shot with me and Tiffanie!

Thirty years of author photos

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that my first book, Silver Threads, came out 30 years ago! Writers are by nature introverts, and one of the hardest things about being a writer is having to endure the “author photo” experience. My first few author photos were professionally taken, but after awhile, I just asked my husband to do it.

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Triple Book Launch at Mabel’s Fables!


So excited to be launching book #3 of my Kidnapped from Ukraine
trilogy at a triple book launch with fabulous Canadian children’s
writers, Anna Rosner and her newest, Last Year with Maddie, and Lorna Schultz Nicholson and her newest, The Man in Motion! Hope to see you
there!

Under Attack receives Social Studies Books Award

Thrilled to learn that KIDNAPPED FROM UKRAINE #1: UNDER ATTACK has been named a Winner of the 2026 NCSS-CBC Social Studies Books Award!

Here’s the full list.

The Notable Social Studies Trade Book Awards are an annual project of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the Children’s Book Council (CBC) running since 1972. This award list features K-12 annotated titles published in the previous calendar year that are exceptional books for use in social studies classrooms, selected by social studies educators.

Creating realistic characters

Do a brainstorming exercise. Get a piece of paper and write down the
names of the two key players.

Ask yourself such things as:

What does this person love? Want? Need?

What bad habit does this person have?

What secret?

What shame?

Something that would make others hate them

Write all of this down on your bit of paper.

Now go to a fast food restaurant and get an application form (or two).
Try to fill the application out as if you were one of those characters.
You’ll be surprised at what they tell you.

Now think of the relationship between your two key characters. Think of
each of their wants/needs/loves. How do they interact? If one character
achieves a want/need/love, does that mean the other character loses the
same? That is a story.

Now set that all aside and write a simple scene with one of these
characters. Don’t try to do too much with it. Show the character
involved in a daily task. Give the character the opportunity to reflect
on things and react to things. It is what happens inside that most
counts, not the outer journalistic stuff. Readers want to step inside a
character’s head and live that person’s life for awhile. Your job is to
enable that.

Once you’ve written that scene, ask yourself “and then what happens?”
Write that. When you write yourself into a corner, try stepping into the
head of your other key character. Repeat.