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  #ScribesAndMakers Sept. 19: "My mistake was..." waiting for the "right" moment.

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  @fairhavenguy@universeodon.com I have a good feeling about The Old Maid and the Sea. I'm betting I'd like it better than Hemingway :-)

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  #ScribesAndMakers July 21: Tell us about a non-fiction book you've enjoyed. I don't read a ton of nonfiction (I like shorter reads like articles for my informational needs), but I did really love Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon. I'm more likely to read a biography than other kinds of nonfiction.

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  #ScribesAndMakers 16 April 2026 How do you feel about illustrations in (non-comic) books? They can be great. Kurt Vonnegut's little cartoons come to mind. Maps can be both beautiful and useful in a fantasy novel. I mostly read via audiobook these days for accessibility reasons…and I miss the art.

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  #ScribesAndMakers April 17 - What's something you've learned in recent research? Been doing some reading about the late 1800s in England for my Gothic romance and was happy to find Oscar and Constance Wilde associated with the Rational Dress movement. Another reason to like them.

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  #ScribesAndMakers 18: Ever read out loud? I "give readings" fairly often in my author life, for which I read aloud my own work in a performance sort of way. I also read it out loud as part of the editing/revision process. But outside my writing life, I only only read out loud if it's poetry or if I'm sharing the reading with someone else (reading a passage to a friend, reading a book to a child).

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  #ScribesAndMakers⁩ 4/19—Have you ever been to a poetry reading? I have been to quite a few. They can be wonderful. The most famous poet I ever heard read was Allen Ginsberg, but I've enjoyed hearing the work of a lot of lesser known poets when I've gotten the chance.

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  #ScribesAndMakers Apr23 Have fairy tales influenced any of your creative work? Definitely. I've got an unfinished sequence of poems pulling from Grimm's fairy tales. One of my published short stories is a retelling of Goldilocks. Besides that, there's the underlying themes of self-reliance, curiosity, and community that populate my wider body of work. It seems obvious to me that all this stuff was written by a girl who read fairy tales as a child.

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  #ScribesAndMakers Apr. 24 — Our next featured creator has a “love/hate affair with common tropes.” What's your relationship with tropes? I feel much the same. They're useful, but they are just tools and I use them as expected or subvert them depending on what serves the story best. Now that I'm writing romance among my other genres, I'm finding it necessary to name my tropes for potential readers.

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  #ScribesAndMakers day 28: Are you interested in etymology? Is there a word with an origin you find especially interesting? Yes! Always enjoy falling down word rabbit holes. I'm especially enamored of Victorian slang at the moment, given something I'm writing.

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  It's my birthday…and a book birthday. I decided the best gift I could give myself was the publication of a book. Not Too Late now widely available! Check it out: https://books2read.com/NotTooLate

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  #ScribesAndMakers Apr 30: What's a problem you solved in your creative work this month? The problems I solved this month in my writing life were mostly about the infrastructure surrounding it: technical aspects, distribution, file acceptance, etc. I'm hoping to do more actual word-crafting next month!

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  New post about going indie over on Substack. This one includes numbers about in-person events and ROI. https://samanthabwriter.substack.com/p/going-indie-month-4

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  #ScribesAndMakers Day 1: Are you starting any new projects this month? I get some travel this month (Ireland! Hurray!), so I expect to barely keep up with current projects (or maybe just ignore them for two weeks) and definitely NOT to start any new ones.

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  #ScribesAndMakers 29 Apr: Someone else promotion day. Tell us about someone else's work. Let's boost away. Have you read @LJ yet? I really love her Halcyone Space series, which hits some of my favorite themes (found family) and creating a wonderful cast of characters I still think about years later. https://www.ljcohen.net/derelict.html

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  #ScribesAndMakers ~ Our featured creator does "a bit of educational activism on the side." Do you do any activism through your creative work? I LOVE this! There are definitely particular issues I grapple with in my work and topics I often speak to on panels and in interviews and the like. My 'axes to grind' mostly center around feminism and attitudes towards women as we age, as well as LGBTQ+ support, and diversity of several types, so I get my fair share of vi...

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  #ScribesAndMakers Mar 21: What everyday object would you photograph as if it were art? That's a fun question. A favorite arty photo subject for me is leaves.

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  #ScribesAndMakers – 20 Mar Self-promotion day. Shame optional My newest work coming in April, May, and June (up widely for preorder now, or hit me up for a pre-publication ARC!). GenX romances, because love finds you when it does, and sometimes that's when you're over 50.

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  If you're curious how my move to indie publishing is going, here's my report from Month 2: https://samanthabwriter.substack.com/p/going-indie-month-2

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  #ScribesandMakers 27 Feb: Splat? It has been that kind of morning, but I have had coffee and have hopes of scraping myself off the carpet in time to go sell books this afternoon.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub ~ How well did this short month go for you, in terms of writing? I didn't feel like I got anything written, but then when I checked my word count tracker I did okay: 7K new words 9K revised. Not too shabby, especially considering I had events every weekend.

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  #ScribesAndMakers ~ How did your month go? It made this windy sound as it went by like WHOOOOOSH! But I did fit a lot in--four author events, getting the next book up in Ingram, and decent progress on the next book. Now I understand why I'm tired.

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  #ScribesAndMakers Mar 1. How much time do you expect to have for creative work this month? It's looking busy again. But I'm stubborn. I'll wrest at least 4 hours a week from the jaws of the rest of the demand-beast.

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  Mar. 2: Do you know your story ahead of time? Not usually, or at least not fully. I get a snippet like a little light bulb over my head and sit down and start writing to discover the story surrounding it. Sometimes that original snippet is in the finished piece, sometimes it isn't. Discovery writer or pantser, as you prefer.

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  #WritersCoffeeClub Mar 2 Does your overall goal differ from project to project? I mean, the basic goal is the same: capture the story to the best of my ability. But everything I write is its own individual challenge with new things to figure out, and there are big differences between projects in that sense. Writing a Gothic romance (current WIP) is VERY different than writing a contemporary romance (previous project) or a superhero story (project before that).

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  #ScribesAndMakers day 3: Ripple? Ripple might as well be my focus word of the year. When I try new things connected to my writing life, promotion, etc. I keep telling myself that I don't know what ripples I've started…so I shouldn't lose heart, even if I can't initially see that it's doing any good. Maybe that's misplaced optimism, but I have seen it happen that something I did two years ago and thought had no effect cycled back around and led so...

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  #ScribesAndMakers Mar 6: How do you choose a title for your book? It varies. Sometimes I actually get the title first. Sometimes I struggle more and have to write the whole piece before I find a good title. The last menopausal superhero novel was SO HARD to name. Same with my most recent romance. I finally had to crowdsource to my critique group, editor, and other writer friends to land on something good.

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  #ScribesAndMakers 3/7 Are you able to communicate in sign language? Not really. In an emergency, I could. use the alphabet and a few random words I learned as a chorus girl so we could sign songs we sang for an audience.

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  Ready or Not, a GenX romance is up on NetGalley. Book releases in June. Check it is out if you're a NetGalley reader! https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/805999

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  #ScribesAndMakers 28 Jan: What's the most stressful thing about your creativity? It's mostly internal: me putting pressure on myself to do more and do it faster. When I can that little overachiever demon under wraps, it actually mostly relieves stress. Of course, I'm not expecting to make a living from my work. I'm happy when it pays for itself at this stage. That makes a difference in external pressures.