What’s your writing inspiration?

I love reading author interviews and speaking to other writers about what inspires them. I think there are as many different thoughts on writing inspiration as there are writing styles. For me, I find my writing inspiration tends to cluster around a few areas:   Travel – always. I’m an unrecovered traveloholic, and will remain…

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Time for writing reflection on the slopes

I often manage a week-long skiing escape with my kids in February. This year, I couldn’t manage a whole week, but we did squeeze in a long weekend on the slopes near Rome. This hasn’t been a great snow winter, and our long weekend included some wet days and lots of poor visibility… where we could…

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What’s the ‘crossroads’ novel?

Once on a long hike, I told my older son the story of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. It terrified him, but also kept him going on a pretty exhausting 12 km trek. I read some novels out loud to my children, and my oldest son asked me if I would read this to him.…

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What are your 2016 writing resolutions?

This has become a bit of a tradition for me – perhaps I’ve figured out a way how to hold myself accountable for my writing schedule. Each year, I set myself writing goals … and up until now I’ve pretty much stuck to schedule. Let’s see if I can keep this up for 2016… Of…

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The lack of pressure before becoming a bestselling author

There’s an interesting interview with the British, bestselling women’s fiction author Jojo Moyes in this month’s Writer’s Digest. In her interview, Moyes speaks about the lack of pressure before writing her most successful book, You Before Me. Before that best-seller, Moyes had written numerous books and had a large and loyal following, but her breakthrough…

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How do you keep track of your story ideas?

Over at the excellent Nathan Bransford blog, there was a great question for authors: How do you keep track of your ideas? This isn’t as easy as it might seem. Writers are – by their very nature- daydreamers, and they may have lots of ideas flitting around in their heads at any one time. Any…

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What are your writing projects this summer?

I don’t know about you, but summer can often be one of my slower writing periods. Roman summers are hot, the days are long and there are lots of distractions to keep me from buckling down behind my computer. I find it an ideal time to day dream, and plot out story lines and characters…

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Work-in-progress wants YOUR opinion

I was thrilled when my blogging buddy, the talented YA author Evelyne Holingue, tagged me for the Work-in-progress challenge. Through her blog post, I discovered that Evelyne is not only a prolific YA author, but she also writes essays on her experiences as a French woman living, working, and raising her children in her adoptive…

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Writing inspiration from Vladimir Nabokov

I’d click into anything with a  title like that. : ) The Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov is one of my favorite writers, and sometimes I feel somewhat like a type of  (accidental) groupie. I studied at Cornell, the university where he taught until he made his name with Lolita and happily gave up academia to write…

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Writing inspiration in the mountains

Although I live in Rome, I love to escape when I can to the nearby mountains of Abruzzo. I have a small place in a little town up in the Apennine mountains, and I enjoy going out there to escape the chaos of Rome – to hike and mountain bike and ski. I was out…

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