I’ve designed parts of multiple alien languages for my Chocoverse books. It’s one of the most fun parts of worldbuilding. I love building lexicons and language rules, and thinking about how prefixes and suffixes can affect a basic word’s meaning. Depending on how much of the language will actually be used in a book or […]
Here’s where to find me doing the virtual book tour thing. I will be adding to this post over the next few months, as I am doing a TON of guest posts and interviews relating to the Bean to Bar Mysteries. But I wanted to get everything in one spot, as the links go live. — […]
I’m excited to show you all the book trailer for Grand Openings Can Be Murder. It is the first book in my cozy mystery series starring Felicity Koerber, a Bean to Bar Chocolate maker who becomes an amateur sleuth when one of her employees is murdered. This book will be released February 2.
Bear with me. I know most of you are writing for adults, but I want to talk in term of kid’s cartoons for a minute. When it comes to aesthetics, there’s nothing that makes the concept easier to understand than animation meant for developing minds. The 2019 Dora the Explorer movie played hard into the […]
Earlier this year, Glenn from Chocotastery interviewed me for the Stay Home With Chocolate Festival, and we discussed how chocolate from different craft makers had influenced the creation of the Chocoverse books. I appreciated how knowledgeable Glenn is about flavor – and I got to hear about his inventory of all the different chocolate bars […]
Here’s my interview with Arcelia Gallardo from Mission Chocolate. I’m excited because we got to do it as a video. We discussed chocolate making, flavor profiles, and one of my favorite topics – cookbooks. So fun to talk to her about her journey. Thank you, Arcelia! Don’t forget to visit Arcelia’s web site https://missionchocolate.com/ . […]
Now that the Dallas Chocolate Festival is over, I got a chance to catch up with Karen Neugebuare from Forte Chocolates. She had done an interesting presentation about taste and chocolate, and I wanted to find out more. Thanks, Karen, for chatting with me. Q: What is the most exciting thing right now about bean […]
One way to attach readers to your character is to present her with a problem, and then let us into how she FEELS about it. If you make those feelings specific – and unique to her – then we can feel them too. Let us in on the character’s specific thoughts, internal physical sensations and/or […]
I’ve talked before about the power of What If questions when it comes to creativity. What I want to talk about today is related: the power of making lists. Lists force you to move past the first idea that pops into your head in answer to a What If question. When I get stuck, I […]
So you’ve come up with a clever twist that you think no one will ever see coming. And you send it to your beta readers, waiting to hear back that the shock and surprise of the twist had them in awe. Maybe that’s exactly what happens. Or . . . maybe they tell you the […]
