The Girdle of Melian

hree of Tara's books are on sale at the moment!


Snap them up while you can!



Last Call, on sale here



"Newly-single attorney Gwen Cooper’s list of things that make her happy is pretty simple:
1. her teenage sons
2. her stilettos
3. finally taking control of her own life

While texting the first on the list to warn them she’s missed her flight home, she plows into a hot-shot movie star, has a lukewarm latte dumped down her blouse, and snaps a heel off item number two. When the actor shows up at the hotel bearing an apology of replacement Louboutins, she should be wondering how he got her room number. Instead, she’s simmering over his well-tailored suit and conjuring more sinful ways for him to make things up to her. And why not? The notorious bachelor is the perfect guy to kick off her post-divorce fantasies of no strings attached. Ever again.

Blake Donovan claimed Hollywood’s top spot by playing the self-centered bad boy his manager and publicist created. Lonely as it is, he’s lo…

quick check in for ROW80, especially as I didn't actually provide an update last week!






I've reprinted The Handful of Time to edit it all over again, but found myself at loose ends in general day-to-day editing tasks, so I've -- possibly foolishly -- sent out a few more queries for two of the other novels.

And I went back to Larksong for the month, in order to participate in the latest exercise on The Lit Forum, which might be called the flip...

"When we write, we paint a scene with our words. Some writers provide a sparse scene with their words, leaving it to the reader to fill the blanks with their own imagination while others add so many visuals aids (colours, smell, touch, etc) the reader can use those to make this more than just a scene, it become alive in a way.

However detailed, the end result is always that the reader has built up a mental picture of the scene, the surroundings, the character, and the reader is relying on this image to follow the story and t…

avourite ending lines from novels!

Here are some of mine, inspired by Malcolm Campbell's recent post, Some of my favorite ending lines from novels. I like especially his choice of Orwell, Milne, and Mitchell.


Joyce's Ulysses was also one of the first to leap to my mind (impossible to quote the whole sentence, of course):

"...and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."


I also thought of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and the line, "'God's in His heaven, all's right wi…

ew round of A Round of Words in 80 Days starts on 2 July!

"What Is ROW80?A Round of Words in 80 Days is the writing challenge that knows you have a life. We are all different and we all have different demands on our time.  Why should we all have the same goal?  The simple answer is that we shouldn’t.  If you want to be a writer, then you have to be able to roll with the punches and adapt to your changing circumstances.  If that means changing your goals when your life blows up, so be it.  ROW80 is the challenge that champions the marriage of writing and real life. For more on why I started it, see this post.
So here’s the skinny:We have 4 rounds a year, each running 80 days.  Your goal can be anything you like as long as it is measurable (e.g. number of words/pages, specified amount of time to spend on writing per day/week, number of pages edited, etc.–for more on what makes a measurable goal, see this post).Once you have settled on a goal, you write it up on your blog (yes,…

nd of another ROW80 round! I'm not ready!


My goals and progress seems to have gotten a bit scattered since the last round. The full set of goals and their various stages of completion look like this:



enter handwritten edits to The Handful of Time (working title) and reread: still trying to finish this

query Druid's Moon: haven't done this yet

query The Charm of Time: I did! No bites...

keep editing Mystery at Bertram's Hotel (working title) on paper: I finished this!

enter handwritten edits to Mystery at Bertram's Hotel: not started yet because --

enter handwritten edits to Captive of the Sea: a new goal, because Harlequin have put out a call for medieval romances

do required research for stories and come up with proper titles

back to school!: this is what took up most of my time. But I'm all done my first year!

think about short story anthology: I did a cover mock up. It needs work

I'm also really far behind in updating my list of books read (see below)...

knit…