I noticed Payback's a Witch when researching genre covers for my own books, The Wheel of the Year series. Payback's cover popped in a long list of Witches & Wizards Romance titles. (Don't judge me for judging a book by its cover!) Someone summed Payback up as Practical Magic meets The L Word. It had me at hello! You could only pre-order at the time, something I rarely do unless I already know the author. (I didn't.) But I took a chance and pre-ordered. An excellent decision.

Advice in writer blogs goes in cycles. Lately, I've read several posts about villains and antagonists. They come with the usual admonition: don't stereotype your villain; humanize him/her. After all, even Hitler loved his dog. More succinctly: The Joker need not apply; Jack Torrance, come on down. It's good advice. Notice whenever someone commits an atrocity, the neighbors say how ordinary the perpetrator was. They would NEVER have guessed. Not in a million years. I am one of

I took a Shakespeare course. All English majors take a Shakespeare course. It's the law. The professor was very ambitious. We would read ALL the tragedies, ALL the comedies, the most important history plays, Titus Andronicus, and a few sonnets. The semester would conclude with The Tempest. The syllabus reminded me of the itineraries of those European tours where you visit 20 countries in 14 days. At the end you say "If this is Tuesday morning, I must be in Paris." I won't s

First, let me set expectations. . . . I read almost anything about ancient Egypt and everything that even remotely touches on Isis and Osiris. I call it research. :-) That being said, I'm picky about what I like, and I'm often disappointed. A whiff of a camel plodding by the newly built Pyramids? Nope. Camels came with the Persians around 700 BC, and the Pyramids were built around 2500 BC. What about descriptions of tombs as cool and shady? You lost me. OK, they ARE shady,

Since it's Valentine’s Day and I'm fascinated by lovers and Egyptology, I wanted to share a romance among the Egyptologists. A Reluctant Romance tells the story of an unlikely couple whose passion for each other equaled their passion for Egyptology. Hilda and Flinders Petrie, noted Egyptologists, shaped England's Manchester Museum Egyptology collection. So, this Valentine's Day, rest assured. Yes, you can find love in the most unexpected places and, sometimes, opposites reall

A young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis attempts to answer the question: What makes a life worth living? in his posthumously published novel, When Breath Becomes Air. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon and writer. He graduated from Stanford wi