How do you measure creativity? Is it liquid so you can measure it in a cup or a bucket and carry it? Maybe it's wind since I often say someone's creativity blew me away. Or is creativity something solid that smacks you upside the head?

Three things that carried, blew, smacked me this week.

First, is the novel, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North. I’d never heard of it, but evidently it was a big hit and all the talk when it first came out in 2014. Not her first book, Claire North made a name for herself after this one came on the scene and I understand why. (more…)

Anyone who has served in uniform knows you can’t do it alone. From the moment you put your boots on, you’re taught there is strength in team and that lesson isn’t forgotten when you take the uniform off.

The team concept is especially apparent with veteran writers and the way we help each other. Kayelle Allen is a best-selling American author who pulled together a group of women veterans who write books and used Veteran’s Day as an opportunity to promote their work. Her Romance Lives Forever  event will be live from 7 p.m. to 11:30 (or 2330 for the military folks) today, Nov. 11. Readers will have an opportunity to communicate directly with a long list of authors, win some prizes and hopefully, find out about some of the work being produced by women veterans.

Kayelle describes her stories as being about, “unstoppable heroes and heroines including contemporary every day folk, role-playing immortal gamers, futuristic covert agents, and warriors who purr.”

Sounds interesting! Read on for the interview. (more…)

I was honored to be asked to contribute to the January, 2016 edition of Combat Stress Magazine from the American Institute of Stress. The special edition that carries my essays is called, Here and Now, Women in the Military, Challenges, Changes and Champions.   

It’s a very different sort of publication from where you’d usually see my writing, but the editor, Christiana O’Hara, PhD, seemed interested in my take on the importance of women telling their own stories, especially when it comes to their military experience, including those that explore the aftermath of war.

In the piece, Read the women who have gone before you; (pg. 38), I talk with Jerri Bell, a former Navy intelligence officer, author and advocate for women veteran writers, who has made listing works by women veterans a pet project that grows more impressive as she continues to build this extraordinary reference. Her goal is to capture and recognize as many as possible and to bring recognition to the veteran status of authors of works we already know. (more…)