Many authors keep in mind an avatar or ideal future reader while writing their books. Christian writing podcaster Thomas Umstattd, Jr. suggests directing our stories to a real person rather than an imaginary persona. The apostle Paul was writing for Timothy—one person—when he scribbled the biblical epistles of I and II Timothy. Yet millions of…
My husband’s a World War II buff, and I too value the rich legacy bequeathed by that generation of heroes. Sometimes I wonder how the stories and screens of the past century would have looked different had the dramatic and traumatic events of two world wars never happened. Certainly, both Hollywood filmmakers and New York…
How often do you not finish the books you’ve picked out and started with such diligent intentions? Though a friend tells me I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive that way, it happens more than I’d like to admit. Back when I homeschooled my girls, we learned one day that King Richard the Lionheart (1157-1199) owned a magnificent…
My two granddaughters were charmed by the quirky set of Russian dolls I put in their Christmas stockings when they visited Chile in December. Someday I’ll share with them the stories inside the story here. As did—surprisingly—a recent guest speaker at our church when he used a set of these dolls as an object lesson….
“Voice,” in literary terms, refers to the attitude or personality of the author, narrator, or point-of-view character in a piece of writing. Voice shows up in both fiction and nonfiction. It can be comical, cozy, sophisticated, simple, intellectual, down-to-earth, edgy, monotonous, etc. But what if I lost my voice? I already know what that’s like…
Everything’s built up. That’s what we noticed most as we left the palafito (cottage-on-stilts) where we’d lodged in Castro and headed for the village of Rilán. The landscape of the Chiloé Islands features many examples of architectural creativity, but today the road was lined with building projects. For starters, we could have arrived at the…
One of the most iconic scenes in southern Chile’s Chiloé Islands must surely be the alley of palafitos, picturesque houses built on weatherworn posts, that rises from a tidal flat to the right of the highway as you drive into the provincial capital of Castro. After lunch on the first afternoon of our anniversary trip…
As we wander through the pages of a book or wend our way through the books of our lives, we often find a bend at the end. You know what I mean? In books, it’s the twist before the tie-up, an incident that might just take the story off in an entirely different direction. In…
“You should see the library where I come from,” I tell people here. Hey, I rarely boast about “back home,” but in this one area I’m guilty of horn-blowing about those endless shelves of books and periodicals at the wonderful library in my little Maine hometown. The first time my daddy walked me up the…
Sometime in the past decade, the Sahne Nuss tin pictured above came home with me in a green-and-white shopping bag from our Jumbo supermarket in Santiago. Everybody, myself included, loves classic Sahne Nuss milk-chocolate-and-almond bars, but mostly I fell in love with the image on the lid. It perfectly pictures our life in the Chiloé…
In the opening paragraph of Destiny at Dolphin Bay, my novel launched just last week, we discover that the narrator and main character must write an essay on “What I Learned in Chile.” She’s not excited about the prospect. In fact, she announces that the only thing she’s learned so far is there’s not much…
Ten, nine, eight… Less than 24 hours before lift-off and Destiny at Dolphin Bay goes live in Kindle and paperback versions on Amazon. Here at Seaglass Sagas I’m celebrating the launch of my first book in the Desert Island Diaries series during the month of August. What’s all the hype about? To learn more, you…
