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Header image: Skeleton hand holding a cracked heart

We have mice in our house.

In the romance version of this story, my husband and I bicker charmingly about how to deal with them. I’m a bleeding-heart city girl who aspires to do no harm. He’s a country boy—somehow still improbably wealthy, so wealthy I don’t have to work if I don’t want to, though I do, because I love being an interior designer—who’s never questioned his God-given right to snap traps. In one scene, startled by a mouse in the dog food, I jump on a chair, screaming, and he spins me down into a kiss. In the end, he plugs the holes they’re getting in through and builds a thriving mouse city in the barn.

June 2025


A Field Guide to Teaching Genre Fiction


From Kissing Books to Killing Books

How Romance Taught Me to Write Horror


An Art and a Science


Opening Day

On Baseball, Poetry, and Permission to Feel


Against Cynicism

“What Makes You a Better Person Makes You a Better Writer”


The Big Conversation

Publishing in a Time of Unrest


Trying to Write in a Terrible World


Confessions of an Antiquarian Bookseller Turned Author

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