The Anxious Author

       I’m not a mom of human children. I have two fur babies, a black cat named Spook and an orange cat named Tarot, but my inboxes are filled to the brim with new mom emails and coupons I’ll never use. Why? Because I frequent baby name sites.  Character crafting is an artform within an artform. You have to craft a character to craft a story, but picking a name can be a painful process. I’ve found in my writing journey that character names develop one of two ways for me. Firstly, I sometimes hear a name and instantly a character forms inside my mind as if just by speaking the name they were spoken into existence.  Secondly, the character starts as a faceless mannequin and I have to paint on the features myself. Most often than not, my characters form by the second method. This means I have to search for names because the characters didn’t come to me with one like a big brand doll.  Baby name sites are a wonderful resource for us writers. You can search by gender, letter, meani

Imagine you’re in a store, shopping for dinner. You put a can in your basket, knowing you’re friends and family will love the dish you’re preparing for the gathering. A person turns the corner and freezes. A large grin splits their face and they start approaching you. You panic. The glint in the person’s eyes is a knowing one. The person recognizes you but you don’t recognize them. You rack your brain, trying to come up with a name to go with the face, but come up empty-handed as they hug you.  This person, whoever they are, regales you with stories of your childhood and says something like, “I remember when you were kneehigh to a grasshopper”. The expression makes you want to snort because you were never small enough to come up to a grasshopper’s knee. Do grasshoppers even have knees?  Whoever they are, they know your family. They start talking about your parents, siblings, grandparents, and cousins. They tell you about relatives you’ve only heard stories of and still, you can’t p

Romance is a genre that people either love or hate. There is rarely a reader that falls within the middle. Inside the genre, like with all genres, there are subcategories. Celeste Night is an author from Birmingham, Alabama that writes 18+ dark romances. Her particular brand of romance contains elements of bullying and organized crime.             “My first book was Queen of Clubs , which I released for free to newsletter subscribers as a prequel to Promise of Embers ,” stated Night. “I released Queen of Clubs in April 2022 via Bookfunnel and Promise of Embers in May of 2022 on KU (Kindle Unlimited).”            Not only is Night an author of dark romance but she’s a reader of it as well. She loves a good story with heavy bully elements. Ultimately, though, the reason she writes what she does is because of a friend.             “My best friend was looking for a book that had multiple men as a love interest, but I couldn’t recommend the books that I love because they were very dark or

M.F. Moody is an Australian author who currently lives in Kent, United Kingdom. Getting to know her has been a joy. I, myself, am not much of a mafia romance fan, but I was pleasantly surprised when I read her book Family Justice and fell in love with the characters and plot. My sister is usually the mafia reader and I instantly recommended Moody’s book to her.  Moody published her first book, Disconnect , in late 2021. It’s a contemporary M/F that fits perfectly into her preferred genres. “I write smutty romance, so definitely 18+,” remarked Moody. “I’ll write pretty much any romance sub-genre, except non-con, ultra-dark, and probably horror. It [choosing to write 18+ romance] wasn’t so much a decision, but a natural happenstance. My mind/imagination can be a strange, dark, and twisted place, so it’s not the best place for those wanting clean, sweet, or family-friendly stories.” Writers get their inspiration from many sources. Our muses don’t come in a single form. A sports repo

      April got away from me. To be honest, so did the first half of May. Like, where did the time go? I'm behind on our author spotlights so it's my goal to get two done this month...the one from April that I missed and then the one for May...considering I haven't even contacted May's spotlight yet, this might be hard to do. We'll see, though.      As for April book reviews...I didn't get as many read as I wanted, but here is the final tally for the month...let's not talk about how far behind I am in May right now.  Rise of the Princess, D.A.L. April Juvenile Fiction, Fantasy, Sci-Fi Middle Grade Ebook 5/5 I liked this book way more than I anticipated. It's an epic fantasy written for middle graders and has a slight science fiction twist to it. This adventure is nostalgic in the way that it invokes wonder and brings to life the fairy tales and monsters children dream of. I'