Month

Please note: Italicized portions of this post are quotes from my book Breaking Point, the story of Andrea Yates. * * * In the days following the June 20, 2001, murder of Andrea Yates’ five children, the City of Houston buzzed with shock, gossip, and confusion. But on September 11, 2001, it was eerily desolate, a quiet stillness I’ve never experienced in decades of traveling to the Bayou City. I think I wa

When I wrote fiction, the life I lived became my writing. A hometown visit with my friend Paula Sue inspired my short story My Sweet Sheri Sue, which you’ll find here and was published in a slightly different form in the anthology Red Boots & Attitude: The Spirit of Texas Women Writers (Eakin Press, 2002). Another short story (that I now find embarrassing) was inspired by an obsession, and a regrettably lost shor

I’m stuck in Whataburger and I don’t want to be.  Rain from Tropical Storm Hermine is slashing out of the sky.  As much as I don’t want to be in the WB, even more of me doesn’t want to get soaked to the bone, as my grandmother would have said, running to my car. I don’t want to be at the WB because I think I may have just written the opening of my book-after-next (meaning the book to be written after I write my secon

The day after I emailed my sex book to my editor in New York, I had so much I wanted to blog about.  Ideas and words kept popping into my head.  But I wouldn’t let myself write them because I felt I needed to take the day off.  The previous four months had been long, hard, and stressful – editing and rewriting my own work under a tight deadline, along with editing and coaching others, teaching, prepping for and going