Wish Tank

Early last summer I took a “staycation” to work on The Mean Bone in Her Body, the first of the New Royal Mysteries series that I’m writing for Pandamoon Publishing, and I made a point of blogging my progress each day. I started my very first blog, Probably Just a Story, because I wanted to keep a log of my writing projects so I could keep my thinking straight, and the Staycation posts were serving the same purpose. Well, a freelancer for ArtsHub, a website for the Australian Arts community, interviewed me and three other artists– Richard Streitmatter-Tran (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), Tara Lynn Groth (Raleigh, North Carolina), and Tracy Durnell (Seattle, Washington)–about our staycation experiences. The article is located under the “Career Advice” area, and it’s behind a paywall, so I can’t link to the full text or reproduce it here, nor do I expect you subscribe to a site that is sort of like AWP for Australian artists, but here’s a snippet from my section:

The staycation boosted her productivity. “I was writing a murder mystery that was a clutter of disparate scenes, and on the final day I found my theme—misconceptions of mental illness. The focus required time to concentrate, plus a deadline to achieve, which was the whole point of the staycation. From then on the writing went very quickly.”

Thank you ArtsHub and Naima Morelli. This was fun.