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When this audiobook is finally available through Audible and other purchase links, I will breathe a sigh of relief. It’s my first audiobook experience, so I have nothing to compare it to. Any project that requires tasks to be completed by other people will invariably run into snags. I’d rather not dwell on that. Surely, though, I fantasize about being a literary star. I could snap my fingers. “Oh, Mr. Smith, what is it? What do you want?” “People, please,” I would say, “could

For my first semester at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, I enrolled in a two- semester course that surveyed European history. St. John’s is a Catholic university and my professor was a Benedictine monk. Our first exam came in the form of an essay. I thought I’d done rather well, but when the graded exam came back, I went into a major panic when I saw I’d received a ‘D’. A big fat ‘D’. A big, red-letter ‘D’. Not wanting to get kicked out of college, I scheduled a pr

For the record, I didn’t wake up one day and decide to write a historical novel about racial tension in 1934 St. Louis. For ten years, I moderated a MeetUp writers group. Around 2017, a number of us decided we wanted to write a YA blockbuster novel. Mine involved a young girl who, in the late 1940s, lived in a rural Minnesota town. Her parents had moved there from St. Louis, MO. The girl’s mother always intrigued me. Around 2019, I started backstory writing exercises for the