Everything in Service to the Story

I’ve been retyping some of the outtakes from A Spark of Heavenly Fire. These are the scenes I deleted from the book (and apparently also deleted from my computer, hence the retyping). Since the story takes place in December, and this is December (as if you didn’t know) I thought I would celebrate by posting [...]

A Little Advice – by Deborah J Ledford

I’m getting ready to submit my next thriller novel to my publisher Second Wind Publishing and find myself in a bit of a quandary. In the first book of my Steven Hawk/Inola Walela series, Staccato, Hawk is the deputy of a sleepy county in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. ICE [...]

Sunshine and Joy After Rain by Sherrie Hansen

In my newly released book, Stormy Weather, several pivotal storms wreak havoc in the lives of the main characters, Rae, Luke, and Mac, both literally and figuratively.  Stormy Weather is a romance, so it will come as no surprise that it has a happy ending – the sunshine and joy after the rain, to quote [...]

A Question in the Night

When I’m working on a novel, I try to stick to a schedule of being at my desk for a few hours each weekday morning. During that time, I do not connect to the internet and I screen phone calls using the caller-id function. If I don’t recognize the caller as someone I need to [...]

A Writer’s Retreat

 Last month I had the privilege of traveling to a quaint little town in northern Iowa to participate in a writer’s retreat, hosted/sponsored by fellow Second Wind Publishing author, Sherrie Hansen. A bonus was staying in her beautiful Victorian Bed and Breakfast. Another was meeting Sherrie, Amy De Trempe, their husbands, and seeing Norm Brown [...]

Staccato: Script vs Novel – by Deborah J Ledford

As I mentioned in a previous article to the series Staccato: Inception, the novel actually began as a screenplay. Staccato was the third script I wrote back in the ‘90s. After the visual of the hands hovering over a piano keyboard, clasped in handcuffs captured my attention (a rendition of what is now the cover [...]

I’ll Never Tell – Will You?

When Night and Day, my first book, was published, I felt absolutely naked. Thoughts and deeds I’d been taught to keep private were suddenly on paper, exposed for all the world to see.  Since I publish under my real name, there was no screening process involved. Anyone and everyone who chose to, could [...]

A Novel with No “Front” Story

I just read a novel by a best-selling author and not to mention names, but most of the book was “back story.” By the time I was 25 pages in, a huge irritant was the word “had.”  The plot almost immediately evolves  into a long chase scene inhabited by characters who the reader gets to [...]

I’m Not Really a Princess . . . But I Play One on TV

For the last eighteen years of married life I’ve flaunted my unknown English ancestry in front of my husband. “One great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a foundling.”
I’d explain how more than likely the child was the Princess of Britain, next in line for the throne, no doubt sought after by ruffians and pirates and spirited away to safety [...]

Driven to Write

I just got back from visiting my daughter on the East Coast. Her life is fuller now than it had been ten months ago. A newborn does that to you.
In addition to her work as a Special Education teacher, she and her husband have a fifteen year old daughter who for the longest was my [...]