I'M DELIGHTED TO SHARE with you that The Walled Garden recently won several lovely awards! I was beyond excited to find out it was the gold winner in the Romance category of the 2022 Foreword Indies Book Awards, as well as a gold winner in the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in [...]
ONE YEAR AND ONE WEEK ago, my lifelong dream of being a published author finally came true! My debut novel, The Walled Garden, entered the world, kicking off an amazing year of opportunities and encounters I could never have imagined. I want to highlight some of them here, and to say thank [...]
I JUST GOT BACK from a walk that perfectly captured this cold, wet spring we've been having, and I keep thinking about these lines from one of my favorite Robert Frost poems (Two Tramps in Mud Time): The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with [...]
AFTER A LONG, COLD winter here in the Northwest, it’s finally starting to feel like spring. There’s something about the change of seasons that makes me want to take stock of where I am now, at this moment. What do I want to focus on? What do I need to do? I [...]
SOMETIMES, NO MATTER HOW you try, life just will not resolve itself into a blogpost. It won’t cohere, it won’t follow a theme—it’s just an all-over-the-map mess. Or so it seems. True confessions: my original title for this post was Love and Romance, but it just would not come together. So, I’ve [...]
IT'S JANUARY, AND if there’s a better month for snuggling inside with a good book and a cup of tea, I don’t know what it is! I’ve recently been inspired to think about my favorite books of last year in terms of Oscar award categories by the fabulous Elsie @ Tea and [...]
AS CHRISTMAS CREEPS EVER CLOSER on its little cat feet, I’ve been thinking back over 2022, and I find myself filled with gratitude. So many wonderful things happened to me this year, and after several really tough years, I think it’s worth celebrating them. The most exciting thing for me, of course, [...]
I'M STILL PROCESSING ALL we saw and did on our trip to France in September, and today I’m thinking about the day we spent at Giverny, Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s famous garden. I’ve always been obsessed with seeing the beauty in everyday things, and in Monet’s work, I find that focus on [...]
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires . . . I SPENT TWO BLISSFUL DAYS in my spiritual home last month, and even though a shocking number of years (43!) has somehow gone by since my first visit to Oxford, I wrote in my journal, “Still as timelessly beautiful and moving [...]
NOW THAT I'M HOME, it’s the bread I miss most. I just got back from ten wonderful days in France—Paris, Normandy, and the Loire Valley. I took hundreds (OK, let’s be honest, more like thousands) of photos of French villages, gardens, chateaux, cafes, castles, churches, cathedrals, and of course, the Eiffel Tower. [...]