Blog

Coronavirus, and a Lesson from New Orleans

Right now, New Orleans is experiencing a failure of its coping skills. This is a city that knows hardship. My New Orleans-set novel, Unbreak Me, put it like this: “We’ve had floods and fires, yellow fever and locusts. Might as well be a paragraph out of the Bible. But we’re still here. Nobody with the spirit of this place in them ever quits. We just turn a funeral into a second line, dancing away from the graveyard. All the time knowing it ain’t our last trip.” New Orleans has weathered more than arguably any other American city and it has come back from all of it in style. You can see all of this best from one of my favorite bars in the city. It’s an outdoor patio built around a lush stand of trees. It’s got a thirty-foot line...
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Unbreak Me Extras, Bonus Material & Wedding ebook

    If you binged your way through Unbreak Me, and you want just a little bit more LJ & Andra, you’ve come to the right place.         Let’s start off with a collage I made for inspiration while I was writing, of my New Orleans musician meets Montana ranch owner’s daughter…   Wedding Story! Want to read about LJ and Andra’s happily ever after? I wrote their wedding story just for fun, once their heart-melting wedding vows popped into my head. But we all know how events this big rarely go as planned… Find out: – What kind of wedding cake LJ would make for his bride (hint: he went  crazy with the flavors, fillings AND decorations)🧁🍰🎂 -Whether the wedding ended up in Montana or New Orleans -The one reason on earth LJ might refuse to...
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The Best & Worst Writing Year

In 2019, I had the worst writer’s block of my career, and in 2019, I went on the most joyous and productive writing bender of my career. Looking back, it makes me a little lightheaded to think about how both those things can be true. I had to take a moment on this, the first day of finally-not-2019 to consider HOW I went from one to the other. It took me longer than it should have to realize I had writer’s block, because I was still writing. Every day, I was writing and revising, working on three different projects. It’s just that everything I wrote, I threw out. I threw out seven openings to one book and six to another. I wrote four entirely different plots to a single book. Instead of feeling better after I’d written for the day,...
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