Looking for Truth in Onaway

Newsletter recipients: Here are the answers to the quiz about aunts. Now I'm going back to work on Aunt Marge , my WIP.  Above is a picture I'm considering for the cover. Does she look scary enough?     Do rothy’s aunt in The Wizard of Oz 2.        The aunt who sings “We Need a Little Christmas” 3.       Charley’s aunt’s impersonator 4.        Excitable Gone with the Wind aunt 5.        Opinionated aunt in Little Women 6.        The “tall one” and the “thin one” who are extremely mean to their nephew 7.       Aunt who reckons Tom Sawyer won’t get to heaven without her help 8.       Aunt determined to make Scout into a lady 9.       Aunt in Harry Potter who looks like a “bad-tempered flamingo” 10     Aunt who comes into David Copperfield’s life rather late, because he was a boy   __3_Lord Fancourt Babberly _2__Auntie Mame _1_  Auntie Em _4__Aunt Pittypat _5__Aunt March _6__Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker in James and the Giant Peach _7__Aunt Poll

  At the urging of a fellow author, I joined a site for writers a month or so back. It’s interesting, but I don’t feel it fits my style—not for writing, not for publishing, and not for promoting. The idea is writing books “to market” or “for market,” which means an author writes what will sell. Early on in my career I had an agent, and she tried to get me to write Amish romances, because they were big at that moment in time. I once heard an editor for a big publishing company say at a conference that anyone who had anything…anything with vampires in it should send it to her, because that was where the market was at that point. The market. The market. The market. you’ve read my work, you know I do pretty much the opposite. I write what interests me, what I feel passionate about. Sadly (or not, if I’m honest about it) that means that my books are all over the place. I have women’s fiction titles (serious stories about women in interesting situations) like Deceiving Elvera and S

Though I doubt that my pause in blogging has caused anyone extensive pain, I would like to explain what caused my long blog-drought. First, I've been working on a novel, which is good but kind of bad. I knew the story and the characters well, but the darned thing would NOT focus. For months the characters wandered through what I believe to be a very intriguing plot without any sort of consensus at the end about why they'd been there. That part has resolved itself. For me, it takes many, many passes before a book starts to feel smooth and focused, but it's finally happening. While this is just the beginning, it is encouraging. Before I can show the story to anyone else, it has to please/excite/gratify me. My second reason for neglecting a lot of things was a fall on the ice in February. For the first time in decades, we decided to stay in Michigan for the winter, and my reward was a broken femur. It was quite an adventure, since I was back in the woods when I fell, but lucki