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A week and a half ago, I participated in a regional author fair at the Nobles County Library in Worthington Minnesota. My table was beside CK Van Dam, who writes historical fiction focused on women homesteaders. She was spurred to write her books after seeing an exhibit, learning about women homesteaders, and learning a statistic….

PastWe had such a lovely community of around 800 people. Many thousands of posts over four years. Great conversations. It was a valuable and interesting resource. Then Facebook ruined it all. As you know, Facebook has a rampant problem with bots and fake accounts. So, they keep adjusting their algorithms to “automatically” catch bad accounts,…

People often ask “how long did it take you to write this book?” The answer is never simple. The process of creating a book takes a long time. The research. The organizing. More research. The writing. The developmental editing. More research. Re-working the manuscript. Early readers and re-working things based on their feedback. The deep…

A few days ago, I went to the mailbox and pulled out the latest edition of South Dakota History, the quarterly journal of the South Dakota Historical Society. I’ve subscribed since the early 1980s, but the arrival of this issue was particularly exciting. The overall theme of Volume 53 Number 4 (Winter 2023) rotates around…

I’d never really given much thought to indexes until a friend (who ran a well-respected publishing organization) casually mentioned that she’d “never cared for” the index in their best-selling book. “Hmmm” I thought. I’d never considered that one could like or not like an index. They just … were. But no! It turns out there…

As we approach publication of We Suffered Much, I’m reflecting on the four-plus years of work that went into its creation. Some of that work actually took place while I was doing research for The Beautiful Snow. Pictured are Lily Coyle (left) and Laurie Herrmann (right) at the Beaver’s Pond office in St. Paul Minnesota,…