Author Archives: Literary-Titan
Dreams Are Important
The Other Disney follows a former baseball player and his family as unexpected setbacks test their resilience, priorities, and ability to find joy in what they already have. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I was inspired by the realization that rich families can visit Walt Disney World often and even take it for granted, while poor families can only dream about seeing what has been called “the happiest place on earth,” even for only a day. Having visited Walt Disney World and taken advantage of the free transportation, such as the Sky Rides, monorails, boats, buses, and trams, as well as the free attractions, such as the exotic animals at the Animal Kingdom Lodge, live music and movies at various resorts, and nightly fireworks, I realized a family could visit Walt Disney World and have a wonderful experience, even if they couldn’t afford the expensive hotels, restaurants, or theme parks. I wanted to share my discovery with families that had more dreams than means, and cast a literary vote for the best things in life being free.
How did the story change from your initial concept to the finished novel?
I write all my novels backwards. I write the ending first, and then record how the characters make it from the start to the finish line. So, the only changes from my initial concept to the finished novel are the addition of ideas I get along the way that enhanced the narrative without changing the plot. These additions may come in the form of supporting characters, minor subplots, or just little-known facts.
Why was it important that Andy’s identity not be defined entirely by baseball?
Andy idolizes his father, and as is true in many strong father-son relationships, Andy realizes that his father’s dream in life to play major league baseball was cut short by a career-ending injury. So, Andy falls in love with baseball just as his father did, but he does so cautiously, realizing that what we do professionally is not as important as who we are. His caution is supported by the humble means of his family, and his realization that dreams are important – even the ones that don’t come true.
What do you hope families might take away from the D’Isignys’ approach to a budget-conscious vacation?
The greatest memories of a vacation rarely take into account how much money was spent as much as they do how the time together brought family members closer.
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After he apprehends a fleeing shoplifter, Val D’Isigny is unexpectedly fired from his job as a security officer at a large North Carolina home improvement center. Unemployed and short on cash, it appears the devoted father will be forced to break an earlier promise and cancel his son Andy’s birthday trip to Walt Disney World.
When all hope for the family’s trip appears to be lost, wife Eleanor searches the internet and comes up with a plan that will allow her family to spend Andy’s 10th birthday at Walt Disney World for nothing more than the price of groceries and gasoline. Her plan includes sleeping in their truck at interstate rest areas, eating food brought from home, and riding the free transportation at Walt Disney World, like the monorail, cable cars, and boats that link the various parks and resorts, and enjoying its free attractions, like the African zoo, resort movies, and fireworks.
Will Eleanor’s plan bring her son the birthday party he dreams of at Walt Disney World?
How will a day in the land of magic change the lives of the D’Isigny family?
Different Walks of Life
The Hunting of the Snark reimagines Lewis Carroll’s famously surreal 1876 poem as a vibrant graphic novel adventure. What inspired you to adapt this classic work?
I fell in love with the poem after discovering it fairly late in life, in a collection of Lewis Carroll poems. The relationships, the world, and the transformations the characters went through during the hunt resonated deeply with me. As I continued to reread and repeat it, the world started to form in my imagination, and I eventually felt compelled to get it out of my mind and on paper.
How did you approach remaining faithful to Carroll’s language while creating a fresh visual interpretation for modern readers?
It was really important to have a crew drawn from many different walks of life for the adventure. Lewis Carroll did this in the original version with the variety of professions. For modern readers, I thought it was necessary to expand on that with a broader range of ages, genders, and ethnicities across the crew so the book could explore the Snarks we hunt today, and how our backgrounds shape the hunt. Beyond that, it was surprisingly easy to stick with Carroll’s original language; changing the pronouns fit naturally into the verse and—if anything—provided an opportunity to deepen the identity of each character.
The crew is wonderfully eccentric, with occupations that are oddly specific and often hilariously impractical. Which character was the most fun to reinterpret visually?
The visual basis for the “frenemies” relationship between Baker and Broker was really interesting to build and see come to life. The visual contrasts between their styles, attitudes, and values came together in wonderful and surprising ways—for example, both incorporate red, but with very different levels of formality.
What conversations do you hope readers have after reaching the final page?
What do a Snark and a Boojum represent, and what does it mean to catch one (or the other)?
Is this a comedy, tragedy, or something else entirely?
And, of course, which crew member are you most like?
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The story follows the Bellman and his eclectic crew—a group brought together by only a common restlessness—as they embark on their hunt in a strange land, which appears to be just the place to find the elusive Snark. But as they travel deeper into this distorted world, their efforts become increasingly fragmented and they find far more than Snarks awaiting them.
Told through a series of vignettes and side quests, the tale unfolds like a riddle. Just like each character’s ambitions, each Fit is self-contained but laced with visual clues that echo and connect the crew’s experiences across the work.
Each walk of life faces unique trials on their path, and the hunt always yields a discovery—though never the one that was sought.
Richly layered with hints, metaphor, and hidden references, The Hunting of the Snark is both a tribute and a transformation of Lewis Carroll’s chaotically brilliant poem; presenting a surreal and beautiful journey about identity, longing, and the price of obsession while finding purpose amongst the nonsense of life.
Movie Stars and Moguls
A Good, Hard Slap is a historical Hollywood mystery about seven women determined to hide what they know about a movie star’s suspicious death. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve heard many stories over the years about how studios back in the Jazz Age were able to hide the bad behavior of their stars. There have also been some unsolved murders, which makes me wonder if they went unsolved due to studio interference. It’s a great subject for noir. I love noir, and now that I’ve finished the book, I see that I was keeping two noir tropes running through the plot of A Good, Hard Slap. The first is the story of basically decent people who devise a hair-brained plan to cover up a secret, and the second is the futility of trying to outsmart a powerful, corrupt system. My favorite example of the first is the film A Simple Plan (1998), based on the book of the same name by Scott Smith. That plot stayed with me for a long time, as did my favorite example of my second trope, Chinatown (1974), which is probably my favorite movie of all time. Chinatown influenced A Good, Hard Slap in many ways, including theme, plot, and the 1930s Los Angeles setting.
I was also influenced by Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, which famously begins with “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” It’s the aftermath of the crime (or death) that most intrigues me, so I proceeded from a moment that I could build upon, increasing the tension on the characters who knew what had happened. When I studied screenwriting many moons ago, this was called “the propitious moment.” The backstory can be filled in as needed.
How did the murder mystery emerge from the historical setting?
The movie business is, of course, famous for the abuse of women, both the sexual kind and the power-wielding kind, which continues right up to the present day. More than a few powerful people (mostly men) have, since the early days of the industry, taken advantage of their power, and it was routinely unreported or covered up until the #MeToo movement went viral a decade ago. I like to call the time before that the “NotMe” era. Women went to great lengths to appear virtuous, hiding abuse that they knew would besmirch their reputations more than the reputations of their abusers. And, as the industry grew, the studios themselves got into the business of hiding the abuses of their most valuable assets – movie stars and moguls. Add to that the sexual mores of the time, which were still semi-Victorian – even in the Jazz Age, most middle-class women still wanted to be thought of as virgins before marriage. I wanted to explore how the convergence of movie-business abuse with the morality standards of the time could lead to murder. It wasn’t hard to imagine.
What sources were especially valuable during your research?
I guess I should begin with my personal experience. I was a steno myself at MGM in the 1970s. I worked for a variety of writers and producers who came to the lot during that time. I imagined the steno office and quiet room at Kaplan Talking Pictures to be like the ones in the Thalberg Building on the MGM lot. The biggest difference between Kaplan and MGM is that at MGM, even though all the stenos were women, our supervisor was a man!
Among the books that provided fodder for A Good, Hard Slap were The Fixers by E.J. Fleming, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince by Budd Schulberg, and Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. The Fixers was especially eye-opening about the magnitude of the outrageous behavior of some of the most revered stars of the past. It was clear that the studios were in complete control of their stars’ images.
There were several movies and actors of the Jazz Age (and recent depictions of the Jazz Age) that helped me visualize Gracie’s world. Here are some that have invaded and colonized my mind over the years: Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man series, Betty Compson in The Docks of New York, Liv Lisa Fries in Babylon Berlin, Greta Garbo in just about anything, John Gilbert in A Woman of Affairs, Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express, the inimitable Buster Keaton in any of his silent films, and Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
What do you hope readers understand about the women who worked behind Hollywood’s stars?
One thing I tried to portray in the women of Kaplan Talking Pictures is the toughness they had to find in themselves to survive in a man’s world. It took moxie to keep going in an atmosphere where they were seen only as helpers to the “creative types.” On top of that indignity, they were also expected to endure sexual harassment as if it were something that could not be helped.
But even more importantly, I tried to explore their reasons for keeping secrets from each other. Sisterhood, in those days, did not necessarily involve honesty. There was so much shame involved in even the slightest slip in the morality of the time (even as the victim of abuse) that women kept their lips sealed for fear of being ostracized.
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Gracie Perkins and six other stenographers at Kaplan Talking Pictures know the film company’s most popular star has been murdered, something the moviegoing public will never know. The studio will tell the district attorney what to believe, and the district attorney will tell the LAPD and the newspapers what to believe. That’s the way it works. As the official story about the “unexpected” death comes out, the seven women don’t know if the studio has any idea what really happened, they only know they have to protect one of their own. They have a plan. But plans have a way of unraveling.
The plan is simple, and it seems to be working at first because Gracie can lie as believably as the studio’s publicity department. She hasn’t been honest about anything for a long time―she can’t be if she wants to keep her pals in the steno pool. They’re the only friends she has in this hard-luck life. She knows from experience that the truth can get you into a world of trouble. But Gracie’s talent for deception doesn’t fly with Detective Nick Zingarelli, who not only gets the real story out of the conflicted Miss Perkins, but eventually opens her eyes to the truth about love.
“A Good, Hard Slap” dives deep into the complicated relationships among the women of Kaplan Talking Pictures as they navigate the stormy seas of their hidden pasts and thwarted ambitions.
Finding the Right Balance
Hope’s Cape of Courage follows a girl who, after someone destroys her fairy village, finds the courage to rebuild it and choose forgiveness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for Hope’s Cape of Courage came from both personal experiences in childhood and what I’ve observed in the lives of children and families around me. Over the years, I have seen how holding onto hurt or anger after a difficult event can have a lasting impact, especially for children who are just starting to understand and navigate their emotions. This is especially difficult if they are living with, or surrounded by adults who struggle to express their own emotions in a healthy way. I wanted to create a story that would help children see forgiveness not as simply excusing someone’s actions, but as a powerful act that can set them free to heal and grow.
Through Hope’s Cape of Courage and the introduction of Hope, the little girl whose healing journey allowed a powerful transformation, enabling her to see the world in a new way, through different eyes, I have created an entire curriculum of stories specifically designed to help children navigate their big feelings and become emotionally resilient. This curriculum is designed to “nip these patterns in the bud” by giving children tools to regulate their emotions and life’s inevitable challenges, long before they become cycles that burden and cripple adult lives. I hope that by reading Hope’s Cape of Courage and the books to follow, families will feel equipped to talk openly about tough emotions like anger, sadness, fear, jealousy, divorce, blending families, and many others, and help build the skills they need to move through those feelings in positive ways.
How did you decide when the fairies should explain forgiveness directly and when Hope’s actions could carry that lesson for young readers?
When I was writing Hope’s Cape of Courage, finding the right balance between explicit teaching and lived experience was one of the most intentional choices I made. Here is how I approached that decision:
Why the fairies explain forgiveness directly-
Children’s emotional worlds are vast, but big concepts like unconditional love, gratitude, and understanding why hurt people hurt others can feel abstract or overwhelming. I created the fairies as gentle guides to give young readers the exact language they need to process these heavier themes. Having them explain forgiveness directly makes the lesson accessible and creates a natural bridge for meaningful post-reading conversations between kids and parents.
Why Hope’s actions carry the lesson-
Teaching the theory of forgiveness is only half of the story. Kids need to see what it looks like in practice. Hope’s physical choices, like going back into the woods, rebuilding the destroyed village, and actively choosing grace over bitterness, show that healing is a deliberate choice. The fairies provide the wisdom, but Hope shows the courage. Through her actions, young readers get to see that moving through grief, fear, and betrayal isn’t just something you talk about; it’s something you actively live through.
What conversations do you hope children and adults will have about Hope’s bitterness before she chooses to rebuild the village?
Children are incredibly observant; they learn so much from what adults do, not just what we say. One of the most powerful ways adults can teach resilience and empathy is by modeling these qualities in their own lives. This means being open about our own challenges, showing that it’s okay to make mistakes, and talking about how we work through setbacks or disappointments. When kids see adults acknowledge difficult feelings and keep going, it gives them permission to do the same.
Why was it important for Hope to acknowledge the harm done as she chooses forgiveness, and what does her pink cape represent?
It’s so important for kids to learn healthy ways to respond to anger because, at its core, anger is a normal and even necessary emotion; it tells us when something isn’t right. But children may not always have the language or coping skills to express their anger safely or productively. Without guidance, kids can become overwhelmed, act out, or even turn their feelings inward, which can affect their confidence and relationships. Through Hope’s Cape of Courage and the rest of the series, I aim to show children that it’s okay to feel angry or upset, and that there are healthy ways to deal with those big feelings. When we teach kids how to recognize what they’re feeling, talk about it, and choose responses that are kind to themselves and others, we are giving them tools they’ll use for the rest of their lives. These skills help children develop emotional intelligence, resilience, and empathy, qualities that not only help them handle difficult moments now, but will also support their mental wellness and relationships in the future. I believe that when children learn to process anger in a healthy way, it opens the door for forgiveness, growth, and deeper connections with others. Hope’s Cape is a representation of the freedom that comes from being connected with your heart, seeing through the lens of unconditional love, and how, when you release anger and unforgiveness, you give yourself, your heart, and your life the ability to reach their highest potential.
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One day while playing in the woods with her cat, Remus, Hope decides to build a village for the fairies. Lined with beautiful paths and gardens, the village grows every day until it is an entire fairy community. But when a shadow moves over the village and destroys her magical creation, an angry Hope decides she will never love anyone or anything again. When the fairies emerge from hiding to offer wisdom, Hope learns to open her heart to forgive, love unconditionally, and courageously try again.
Hope’s Cape of Courage is the story of a little girl who, with help from her magical friends from the forest, finds a way to release her pain and forgive.
An Engaging Story
Broome Enigma follows an artist as she falls for an amnesiac man and uncovers a dangerous mystery involving corrupt police, drug smugglers, and attempted murder. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
My husband Hartley and I have travelled extensively throughout the Australian Outback and love Broome, a cosmopolitan coastal town in Western Australia, the setting of my novel. On one of our trips, a handsome, suntanned, but unsmiling young man dressed only in jeans and sandals was the maintenance man in one of the Outback caravan parks at which we stayed. Because he didn’t ‘fit’ and I wanted to make him fit, I played the ‘What If?’ game until I came up with a plausible reason for him working in the park. Once I came up with him as my hero, Joe, and my setting, Broome, a heroine, a title, and the outline of a plot soon followed.
Why was it important to make Jodie warm, capable, and direct?
I like to make each character different from another and interweave them to make an engaging story. At first, Jodie was a foil for her somewhat irresponsible younger sister, Tiffany, but, more importantly, as the story progressed, she needed such qualities or needed to develop them to help a confused young man find his identity and get back his purpose in life.
How did you decide where to place the romantic turning points?
Once I got the characters established in their setting, they virtually took over with just a push every now and again from me if things were happening too slowly or too quickly. Sometimes I couldn’t wait to get to my computer to see where they were going to take me.
Are there particular themes or questions you hope readers discuss after finishing?
- As your perceptive reviewer pointed out, the main characters’ ‘repeated debate over whether Joe and Marc are the same person’ turns the amnesia romance into a story about identity as well as attraction. Critic Karen Bartell asks: What role does identity play in relationships? How important are shared experiences and memories? How does each person’s set of values attract or influence the other?
- Did the author succeed in entwining ‘romance, mystery, and the Broome setting’? If so,
how? - What made each of the characters memorable and believable?
- How could the characters continue in a sequel? (I already have a number of ideas myself.)
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At the holiday village where she is staying, she meets Joe, a young man who works there. Despite the strong attraction between them, the many unknowns about his earlier life keep them apart. To try to uncover his mysterious past, they travel to Perth and back to Broome and are drawn into not only bizarre but also dangerous situations.
Is Joe the person Jodie thinks he is, or is he some alter ego? Can she stop their relationship from developing until she knows whether he is free to love her?
Prejudice and Polarization
The Sticky-Fingered Foodie is a witty two-play collection featuring Grandma, food-truck thieves, and comic chaos while exploring hunger, generosity, and human assumptions. What first inspired this collection?
My conscious mind would cite the early, short plays of Edward Albee, which I saw and read in my youth over fifty years ago and which have remained odd favorites ever since. My unconscious mind might respond differently, of course. Let’s just say Albee+. Admittedly, there’s a lot of actual life experience stirred in. While dropping off a few spare canned goods at a local food bank recently, I came face-to-face with people who were basically just like me minus a few spare canned goods. That certainly got me a-thinkin‘!
What did you want readers to consider about generosity and judgment?
We’re all in this together. Full stop. I’m a big believer in the concept that when we share with and support each other, we’re all better off. We may not agree with or even particularly like each other, but, spoiler alert, that shouldn’t matter. That may sound woefully simplistic, but it’s the best answer to prejudice and polarization. Only together can we stop the madness.
What does the play suggest about the danger of forgetting?
My own grandma had an expression: “Grow, don’t wither!” Whenever I’d bomb on a test at school or misplace my rain boots or have to pay a 5¢ fine at the library because I’d failed to return books on time, that was her advice. Deal with it, learn something, move on. I no longer have to worry about tests, rain boots, or fines at the library, but I’m still learning what life has to teach me. Unless one is mindful of and honest about the past, present, and future, even the painful stuff, withering happens.
What have you learned from writing short plays that you might carry into future work?
Short plays are both fun and challenging because everybody and everything must be essential and related. That’s good practice for any kind of writing. I’m working on a full-length play now (which will be my first), but I still love the short play form. Incidentally, my new full-length play will feature Mikey and Mags from The Sticky-Fingered Foodie, so I guess I’ll be carrying quite a bit into future work!
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Daily Sacrifices
The Debt of Free Men follows a young Basque soldier through Napoleon’s final campaigns as romantic ideas about warfare give way to its physical reality. Why did you choose a young Basque seminarian as the character through whom readers experience these events?
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Napoleon as a historical figure, so when I decided to write my own novel set during this era, weaving in my Basque heritage felt like a natural choice. The seminary aspect comes from a deeply personal place as well—it was directly inspired by stories my father told me about growing up in the Basque Country. Placing a seminarian on the front lines allowed me to explore a profound internal friction.
What parts of Jean-Pierre’s identity remain intact despite everything he experiences during the campaigns, and how does his religious background influence the way he thinks about killing, duty, and responsibility?
Even when forced through the crucible of war, Jean-Pierre’s faith and his deep commitment to his loved ones and friends remain the bedrock of who he is. That isn’t to say his faith goes untested—he questions it repeatedly as he witnesses the horrors of war. Balancing the strict moral tenets against the violent demands of military duty creates a heavy psychological burden. Ultimately, it is his loyalty to the people he loves that acts as his anchor. While his religious framework forces him to wrestle with the gravity of killing and responsibility, his devotion to his brothers-in-arms and family gives him the strength to endure and, eventually, reconcile the choices he made.
What interested you about contrasting an enormous historical victory with the personal costs experienced by the people who helped achieve it?
As a history enthusiast, I’ve always been drawn to grand strategy, sweeping troop movements, and the high-level politics that shape empires. But as a former infantryman, my connection to history is rooted in the ground level. I know what it means to be the person living through the mud, noise, and confusion of the moment. History textbooks often celebrate victories in broad, triumphant strokes, but those grand outcomes are paid for in the daily sacrifices of individual soldiers. I wanted to tell the story from the dust-level perspective—where victory isn’t measured in lost territory or glory, but in the human cost borne by those who fought.
When readers finish The Debt of Free Men, what do you hope stays with them about freedom, sacrifice, loyalty, and the ordinary people who carry the consequences of history?
While I certainly had my own intentions and emotional goals while writing, I believe that once a book is in a reader’s hands, the experience belongs to them. We all view things through the lens of our own lived experiences, values, and perspectives. Two people can read the exact same ending and walk away with entirely different emotional truths. My hope is simply that the story prompts readers to look past the grand monuments of history and reflect on the quiet, ordinary people who actually carried its weight—whatever that reflection ultimately means to each individual reader.
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But first he must take the leap from boy to man as he seeks adventure and glory. He must risk his father’s wrath as his desires lead him away from the seminary where he has spent the past two years.
He may soon come to regret what he has wished for. A soldier’s life is not what he imagined, but now he is caught in the current of history, and he has no choice but to be swept along. Little does he, or anyone else, know how his actions will be the stone that ever so slightly changes the world and the course of history.
Spiritual Histories
It’s Okay, I’ll Remember follows a woman through a life shaped by abandonment, sexual abuse, military culture, motherhood, grief, therapy, and relationships that challenge her understanding of love. When did the idea of “remembering” become the central framework for Lia’s journey?
The concept of remembering became the core framework the moment I realized Lia’s story wasn’t just about surviving adversity; it was about truth-telling. When you grow up through trauma, abandonment, sexual abuse, and high-pressure environments like military culture, your survival instinct tells you to adapt, hide, or forget in order to protect yourself. But true healing requires the opposite. For Lia, “remembering” is the key that unlocks her liberation. It’s not just about recalling events; it’s about shedding the masks, stepping out of past abuse, and remembering who she was before the world told her who she had to be to survive.
How did you develop the spiritual framework surrounding the Lattice?
The concept of the lattice grew out of a desire to visualize how our experiences, connections, and spiritual histories are actually structured. When we go through deep trauma or loss, life feels fragmented, like broken glass. But when you step back and look at it through a spiritual lens, you begin to see that nothing was random.
The lattice is essentially the blueprint of our soul’s interconnections. It’s the invisible web that connects us to our past lives, to the people we make soul contracts with, and to the continuous thread of source energy moving through us. I developed that framework to give Lia and the readers a way to see that even in her darkest moments, she was never truly lost or isolated. She was simply navigating a complex grid of learning, seeking, and ultimately reclaiming per her place in that divine structure.
The book explores reincarnation, soul connections, divine guidance, and spiritual identity through Lia’s perspective. How did you decide how to translate those beliefs and experiences into fiction?
Translating deep spiritual concepts like reincarnation and soul connections into fiction came down to one principle: keeping it grounded in emotional truth. High-concept ideas can easily feel abstract or detached if they aren’t tied directly to human experience. Fiction became the ultimate bridge. It allowed me to take multi-dimensional truths, like past-life recognition, divine guidance, and spiritual identity, and anchor them in raw, relatable moments: the sudden weight of an unexplainable bond, the visceral ache of grief, or the quiet moment a pattern finally breaks. By telling it through Lia’s perspective, the reader isn’t just learning about these concepts; they are feeling them unfold in real-time, watching how spiritual awakening directly heals earthly wounds.
How has writing Lia’s journey affected your own understanding of the experiences that inspired it?
Writing Lia’s journey was a profoundly integrative and healing process. When you live through intense experiences, they can feel loud, fragmented, and often so isolating that you feel as if you are in a hole so deep the entrance is as far away as the light from a star. But when you sit down to transcribe those experiences into a story, you’re forced to step back and look at the whole map. The inner work you do bringing yourself back to wholeness and, in doing so, climb your way out of that hole.
Putting it on the page gave me a lens of deep compassion, not just for Lia, but for the real-life resilience that inspired her. It shifted my understanding from “how did I survive that?” to “look at how much wisdom was gained from that.” Writing her story didn’t change what happened, but it permanently transformed my relationship to it. It validated that the pain was never a punishment-it was preparation for my life’s purpose: guiding and helping others to heal. And that ultimately, my soul knew everything would be okay… because I remembered.
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