Who are your readers?... Target audience is critical... Artful placement of these terms in online captions and metadata can also help our AI-driven social media-soaked system to connect me to my readers....

A Writer’s Identity, Niche, Online Presence, Audience & Influence Amid The Algorithm ... Am I an alarm system, an overthinker, an unbalanced laundry load, a crown?

As a kid, I didn’t love reading. It made me sad when I was expected to transition to books without illustrations.

Recently one of my neighbors told me he would never waste his time reading a thriller. I couldn’t decide how much to throw back at him. Did you forget I write thrillers? Worse, do you actually remember, and you made that comment anyway? People have their reasons for avoiding thrillers: “I only read biographies,” or “I only read nonfiction.” A photographer friend offhandedly said to me, “Do people still read books?” Sometimes, I listen or chuckle, maybe shrug a little. Why get

A version of this narrative is that foreign correspondents must be spies.

I started writing The Secessionist’s Wife around the beginning of 2021, back when our local schools were online due to the pandemic. It was only a few months after I had just published my second thriller Source of Deceit, and I was eager to get back into the fun of dreaming up characters and scenarios, rather than dealing with the logistics of the publication process. As a mom who still had a kid at home, I had no idea how long it would take ...

A Fun Thriller and an Ode to the Country That I Love

(Note: The following post was originally written and posted when I published my second novel, "Source of Deceit," in 2020.) When people hear “spy story,” they often think “James Bond.” The womanizing British assassin, also known as “007,” certainly looms large in the collective imagination, and he is indeed the reason I discovered the genre. As a high school kid, I loved Hollywood’s James Bond movies, but it was really the James Bond novels by the talented English author Ian