Gowns have been ironed and pressed. Parties have been planned. Parents have purchased their tickets and reserved their seats. The commencement speakers have practiced their speeches. Four years plus have been working toward this one moment

Try to find a fictional book that isn’t about relationships. Man-verses-nature stories, like Cast Away or The Martian, where the hero fights to survive in isolation, might come to mind. However, in both movies, the struggle was to return to their friends and loved ones and how they handled the absence of personal interaction.

My friend’s hands shook as she showed me the pages of the book Concussion that her son had been assigned to read as a sophomore in high school. She’d highlighted the pages...

My oldest son is starting to look at colleges. Stacks of brochures arrive every day in our mailbox with smiling faces of young adults on the front, all of them stating they have state-of-the-art programs. The pressure to measure up increases as grades, essays, and S.A.T. scores threaten to limit your options or categorize kids into specific levels.

I woke this past Saturday at 5:30 am, and my blood turned to ice as I turned on the news. The Governor of Kentucky stood in front of a podium, and the electronic banner beneath him read, Massive tornado hits Kentucky. The screen changed to a map of a red line that ran straight up the state’s western side—right to where my parents lived.

Nothing happens to water until it reaches 32 degrees. Until that marker, ice won’t melt and water won’t freeze, but once the temperature hits that degree, things start to happen. Life can be a lot like water. We wait and we wait, and nothing seems to happen.

In writing, the doorway of no return is the situation that pushes our hero into a new normal. In the story’s opening, a glimpse of the hero’s life as he knows it is depicted until something rocks his world. The hero is thrust, whether willingly or unwillingly, into a new normal.

Dig deeper is typed into the margins of my rough draft.

My novels all follow a pattern. The heroine and hero are going about their daily lives trying to maintain the status quo when an inciting incident throws their ordinary world into chaos. This new struggle reveals wounds and insecurities and forces them to figuratively look at themselves in the mirror and realize they are broken. Up to that point, they’ve been either ignoring their issues or trying to fix the brokenness by themselves. The problem is, they can’t. And neither can we.

I love feisty heroines who stand their ground, put their foot down, or dish it back out to the hero. I’ve never considered myself a gutsy person. Sure, I like rollercoasters, but I’ll climb the curtains if I see a spider.

What do Froto Baggin’s from Lord of the Rings, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Marlin from Finding Nemo, and Luke Skywalker from Star Wars all have in common, besides being movie characters?

Discovering our distinct voice can be not only challenging but also scary. What makes us unique makes us dissimilar. To stand out can also mean to be exposed.

I used the above quote, “If you’re going to drug me, make sure it’s with poison,” from Miss Dodd’s character in my recent release, The Captain’s Quest. As part of my marketing strategy, I created it into a meme to shock the reticular activating system of people’s brains in an attempt to gain their attention.

Inspiration for my books typically comes from real-life experiences: my own, from history, or friends’ stories. Reality, however, can be stranger than fiction.

I can write about chiseled features, a shirt stretched across broad, muscular shoulders, a lithe, athletic build, and thick waves of dark hair curling slightly at the ends, but that isn’t what makes a hero sexy—at least not enough to keep readers flipping pages.

Criticism can be a painful pill to swallow. I’ve lost sleep over bad reviews. One person called into question the proper use of an English courtesy title used with one of my characters. There’s a good chance that I got it wrong, even though I’ve done extensive research to stay as historically accurate as possible. When to use which English title is confusing.

Coasting only got us so far before we rolled to a stop....