Blog Archives
Writing About the Emotional Fallout
A Thousand More centers around identical twins separated as infants whose buried truths are brought to light following a tragic accident. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration for A Thousand More came from a dream I had in 2005. I dreamt about Michelle Carrington and Bradley Cole and immediately knew Michelle was an identical twin. As I began developing the story, Michelle’s twin was named Danielle at birth but was later renamed by her adoptive parents.
I knew I needed two names that would sound alike when shortened. That’s how Michelle became “Chelle” and her twin sister, Shelby became “Shel”.
By telling the twins’ stories in tandem, my intention was to give the reader the opportunity to build a connection with all the characters that touched Michelle’s and Shelby’s lives from infancy into adulthood.
Family secrets drive much of the plot. What fascinates you about the consequences of hidden truths?
For me, writing about the emotional fallout when the truth is revealed is both intriguing and interesting. People often believe their decision to hide the truth comes from a place of love and protection, but secrets rarely stay buried. I was intrigued by why people keep secrets and how their decisions can affect lives even decades later. When that secret is revealed, the unintended consequences create a compelling story.
The mistaken identity storyline creates both tragedy and revelation. What interested you about that narrative device?
I’ve always been fascinated by the mistaken identity storyline because it creates opportunities to explore characters who face difficult choices, experience heartbreak, yet still find hope during times of tragedy.
It was important to the storyline of A Thousand More that the name Chelle/Shel be familiar to the twin who is diagnosed with amnesia after the tragic accident. Mistaken identity was just the top layer to the depth of the story.
I enjoy writing about how characters navigate the consequences of their decisions when circumstances are out of their control. Writing a story whose characters undergo personal growth often resonates with readers. I wanted readers to experience the emotional tension and complexity of my characters’ journey.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
The next book I’m working on is another family-saga romance set in a small, dusty town (not yet named) in Texas and the fast-paced world of Santa Barbara, California. The story revolves around Jessica Carter, a fiercely independent Texas bartender, and Keith Branson, a charming, confident professional who enjoys a privileged life. Their story brings all the drama of family secrets, romance, an unexpected twist, and found family.
Currently, there is no set date for availability; however, the estimated publication date will be at the end of 2026 or the beginning of 2027.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
When Ann Carrington’s dream of motherhood is shattered by a devastating choice in 1982, the consequences ripple through the lives of identical twins, separated at birth and raised in worlds apart. One grows up in privilege, haunted by a sense of loss she cannot name. The other, adopted by a loving nurse, finds strength in overcoming tragedy and forging her own path.
As Michelle and Shelby’s parallel lives unfold, love, betrayal, and fate draw them together decades later, culminating in a heart-stopping moment that will change everything. When the truth slowly unravels, their families must face the fallout of tragedy and mistaken identity, leading to a heart-wrenching decision.
With unforgettable characters and a story that explores the depths of forgiveness, identity, and the ties that bind, A Thousand More is a poignant testament to the resilience of the human heart.
Witness to Tribulation
Liz Finnegan’s Witness to Tribulation is a reflective historical novel about inheritance, grief, and the strange pull of Gettysburg. The story follows Emily Tomaso, a young woman who leaves a tense home life behind after inheriting her grandmother’s family house in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. What begins as a fresh start becomes something deeper when Emily finds an old Civil War diary and starts sensing that the past in this town is still very much alive.
The book blends family drama, romance, history, and ghost story in a way that feels personal rather than flashy. Emily’s connection with Peter Sanders gives the story warmth, but the heart of the novel is really her growing relationship with the people who came before her. The Civil War material is woven into the plot through Gettysburg itself, through the diary, and through the emotional residue left behind by ordinary people who had to survive extraordinary suffering.
Finnegan’s strongest idea is that history doesn’t stay sealed away in textbooks. It moves through families, houses, memories, and even silence. That idea comes through beautifully in the repeated use of candles, bells, old rooms, and remembered voices. One line captures the spirit of the town especially well: “If you were to put a candle in every window in this town, it still wouldn’t be enough to acknowledge all of the suffering.” That sense of reverence gives the novel much of its emotional weight.
Emily’s journey also works because it’s grounded in everyday hurt. Her strained relationship with her mother, Mandy, gives the story an intimate tension that balances the larger Civil War history. As Emily uncovers the pain carried by her ancestors, she also begins to understand her own family with more tenderness.
Witness to Tribulation is a heartfelt novel about memory, forgiveness, and the ways a place can shape the people who live there. Finnegan writes Gettysburg as more than a historic site; it becomes a living space where sorrow, faith, love, and reconciliation meet. Readers who enjoy family-centered historical fiction with a spiritual atmosphere will find this book thoughtful, sincere, and easy to settle into.
Pages: 324 | ISBN : 978-1637777749
A Product of Creative Storytelling
Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland follows a Norwegian immigrant family’s journey from the rugged valleys of Norway to the windswept prairies of Nebraska. What first drew you to transform your family history into fiction rather than memoir or nonfiction?
Though Voyagers: Homeland to Heartland is based on a true account with actual events taken from historical records, family journals, diaries, letters, and various personal collections, much of the dialogue and sensory detail is a product of creative storytelling.
I believe this blend of fiction and nonfiction became a more honest vessel for ancestral memory than the half-stories that are often passed down through generations. The split between fact and fiction wasn’t a chasm; it was a braid, the strands made stronger when entwined.
Faith steadies many characters, but it doesn’t spare them grief or moral difficulty. How did you approach writing spirituality without turning it into easy reassurance?
It was important to show how faith shaped the characters’ lives while also shining a tender light on their struggles, vulnerabilities, and gradual acceptance of their circumstances. This was never a story about an easy existence, but more about perseverance and resilience in the face of hardship.
The vignette structure richly details episodes across generations and suits the material but creates its own challenges. How did you decide what each vignette needed to do for the larger story?
I structured the vignettes to carry readers through the family’s joys, sorrows, struggles, and hardships. My hope was that these detailed scenes would draw readers more deeply into the story.
The temptation was always to linger, circle back and revise, but I forced myself to move chronologically, as if pacing out a timeline on some empty stretch of prairie. The result was a quilt of moments, each square stitched with its own sorrow and hope, but together forming a collective resilience.
Omer’s loss and the family’s final reckoning with love, silence, and truth give the book its closing weight. What did you want that ending to feel like — resolved, aching, or something harder to name?
For the ending, I intentionally avoided a neat, predictable closure. The true family story was marked by tragedy, and Omer’s death brought long-buried conflict to the surface. I wanted the ending to hold both the raw pain of loss and the quiet resignation that followed. There was no real resolution—only acceptance, or perhaps the illusion of it.
On a deeper, more personal level, my grandmother and father were never given the chance to be heard. She was judged harshly for betrayal and yielding to a forbidden love. My father, marked by this scandal and set apart from his siblings by the color of his eyes and the curl of his hair, endured his own exile. The family’s solution was silence: no confession, no forgiveness, just an unspoken pact to let the wounds heal over time.
I spent my childhood observing the subtle choreography at family gatherings, the practiced dance that ensued whenever painful topics entered the conversation. I learned early that stories had the power to heal, but also that the wrong story, or an incomplete one, could wound the very soul. In writing Voyagers, I was not only giving voice to my ancestors but also breaking the pact of silence that had defined my family for a century. Every word became a kind of restitution.
My goal was never to rewrite history, but rather to restore it: to take the faint, wavering outlines of my family and thicken them until they could be seen in all their flawed fullness. The book’s conclusion, though unresolved, felt honest. There was no final reckoning, only the hard-won acceptance that sometimes comes after loss.
What I desired most was for my grandmother and father to finally be heard—to have their true selves, in all their complication and contradiction, stand tall and unashamed. In the name of propriety, their stories had long been silenced—until now. I wanted to give them a voice; they waited nearly 100 years for the truth to be told.
Author Links: Website | Amazon
Rooted in the author’s own heritage, the story follows Kittil and Marte Dyrebu as they leave behind everything familiar-family, language, and homeland-to chase the promise of opportunity in America. Their passage across the Atlantic is only the beginning. What follows is a lifetime of perseverance: carving a home from raw prairie, enduring devastating storms, profound loss, quiet joys, and the relentless demands of frontier life.
Told through richly detailed vignettes, Voyagers weaves together the lives of parents and children, siblings and spouses, revealing how love, faith, and tradition are carried forward even as circumstances change. From intimate moments around a family table to life altering crossroads shaped by duty, sacrifice, and longing, each generation faces its own tests-yet remains bound by shared memory and resilience.
At its core, Voyagers is a tribute to storytelling itself: the way stories preserve identity, heal grief, and connect past to present. It is a novel for anyone drawn to historical fiction, immigrant journeys, and the enduring power of family legacy.
Both tender and unflinching, Voyagers honors the courage of those who came before-and the stories that continue to shape who we are.
Eye of the Storm
Eye of the Storm by Charles Gomez is a literary fiction novel with the sweep of a Cuban American family saga and touches of magical realism. The story follows Lazaro Lopez, a seventy-year-old man trying to write about the hurricane that shattered his childhood in Hialeah in 1963. As he looks back, the storm becomes more than weather. It opens the door to buried family trauma, domestic violence, Santería, faith, shame, survival, and the long, uneven road toward forgiveness.
I really liked the way Gomez writes memory as something that feels alive. Lazaro’s voice moves between fear, humor, tenderness, and pain, and that mix feels honest. I liked that the book doesn’t treat childhood trauma as one clean wound with one clean cure. It lingers. It changes shape. Sometimes it hides inside a joke, a ghostly visit from Mami, a creaking rocking chair, or a scene filled with storm winds and old Cuban songs. The writing can be lush, especially when Gomez describes Hialeah, the family home, the religious imagery, and Esperanza’s presence. The style can be theatrical, which makes sense given the book’s roots as a play. I could feel that stage energy in the dramatic confrontations and heightened spiritual moments.
I also admired the author’s choice to blend realism with Santería, Catholicism, and folklore instead of keeping the story in a strictly literal lane. That choice gives the novel its strange pulse. The spirits, visions, and rituals are not just decoration. They show how people reach for meaning when ordinary language fails them. The book deals candidly with abuse, violence, mental illness, incarceration, and family damage. I found myself appreciating the compassion in the novel, but I also needed to pause sometimes. Gomez asks the reader to sit with hard things, and he doesn’t always soften the blow.
As a work of literary fiction and magical realist family saga, Eye of the Storm will appeal most to readers who like emotionally intense novels about memory, heritage, trauma, and healing. I would recommend it to readers who appreciate character-driven stories rooted in Cuban American culture, especially those who are drawn to books where the past keeps speaking until someone finally listens. It’s heavy, heartfelt, and its strongest moments come from a simple question: how does a person survive what should have broken them?
Pages: 376 | ASIN: B0FX9H5SZM
Baker Vaughan
Baker Vaughan is a contemporary family saga that follows a man in his fifties who leaves a polished but hollow life in New York, heads to Idaho, and tries to reclaim a calling to the priesthood that he abandoned decades earlier. From there, the novel opens outward into his past and present at once: family history in Virginia, old love, public shame, church politics, private guilt, and the stubborn hope that a person can still change late in life. What stayed with me most is that this is not a story about reinvention in the glossy sense. It is about excavation. Baker is not building a brand-new self. He is digging through the rubble of the one he kept dodging for years.
What I liked most about Hotchkiss’s writing is that it trusts conversation, memory, and moral mess more than plot tricks. The book has a big emotional reach, but it usually moves in a human scale, one uneasy conversation, one humiliating mistake, one remembered kindness at a time. I found that effective. Baker can be self-aware and self-deceiving in the same breath, which made him feel real to me. The prose often lingers on place, class, church ritual, and family texture, and that gives the novel a lived-in quality. I could always feel the author’s investment in these people, and that sincerity carried me through.
This book does not treat religion as wallpaper or as an easy source of wisdom. It treats faith as something tangled up with vanity, longing, performance, grace, and the need to be forgiven without always knowing how to earn it. That made the novel feel sharper to me than a simple redemption story. I also liked the way the family saga side of the book deepens the present-day drama. Baker’s mother’s alcoholism, the pressure of class and expectation, his early sense of calling, and the old relationships that still shape him all give the story weight. You can feel how the younger Baker never really disappears. He just ages into a more complicated man.
Baker Vaughan will resonate with readers who enjoy character-driven fiction, church and family dramas, and novels that care more about conscience than speed. I would recommend it to people who like literary fiction with a strong emotional backbone, especially readers drawn to stories about second chances, spiritual restlessness, and the long shadow of earlier choices. It’s reflective, sometimes raw, and patient in the way it lets a life unfold. The people most likely to appreciate it are readers willing to sit with an imperfect man and watch him try, fail, remember, and keep reaching anyway.
Pages: 337 | ASIN : B0GWRRNGSR
Mijo: We Bend, Not Break
Mijo: We Bend, Not Break opens as a multigenerational story about inherited silence, migration, and the long, uneven labor of becoming a different kind of man. Author Francisco Castillo begins in drought-stricken Michoacán with Joaquín, a boy starved for tenderness, then follows him across the border into California, through field work, fear, fatherhood, and the psychic aftershocks of survival. The book keeps widening from there, tracing how masculinity, trauma, family memory, and healing move from one generation to the next without ever feeling schematic. What stayed with me most was its belief that resilience is not hardness, but the stubborn decision to remain reachable.
What I admired first was the book’s emotional architecture. Castillo understands that generational damage rarely announces itself with grand speeches; it shows up in the hand that doesn’t quite reach back, the hug withheld, the child who learns to read distance as weather. Joaquín is drawn with real pity but not indulgence, and Antonia emerges as more than a counterweight to him: she is flint, witness, and moral pressure. I felt the novel’s strongest current in the scenes where love exists before the characters know how to perform it. That gives the book an ache that feels earned rather than manufactured.
I also liked that the prose aims higher than plain utility. At times it’s lush, but more often it lands on sharp, memorable images: labor as a language, silence as inheritance, tenderness as something nearly unbearable to touch. There are moments when the sentiment edges close to overflow, yet the book repeatedly recovers because its core insight is so recognizable: people can mistake emotional deprivation for strength, then spend a lifetime trying to unlearn the error. By the end, I felt I had read not just an immigrant family story, but a study in repair, crooked, incomplete, and therefore convincing.
I would recommend this to readers of family saga, immigrant fiction, literary fiction, historical fiction, and trauma-and-healing narratives. It will likely speak to readers who respond to the intergenerational emotional intelligence of Sandra Cisneros or the intimate family gravitas of The House on Mango Street, though Castillo is writing in a broader, more openly restorative register. This is a book for readers who can bear tenderness without mistaking it for softness. Its deepest argument is simple and durable: what we inherit may wound us, but it does not get the last word.
Pages: 216 | ASIN : B0FT6N57CG
… and to take over my life
Tom Ryan’s Shoes is a ghost-tinged Irish historical novella in which a famine-era journey becomes a story of survival, courtship, folklore, and the inheritance of memory. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Well, it’s difficult to give one simple answer. The Canterbury Tales and The Wizard of Oz were literary inspirations. So were stories of elves, fairies, and leprechauns I heard as a pre-schooler, along with family stories I heard about the Great Famine. I had long assumed that the famine had driven my family to come to America. But then, in recent years when I took up genealogy, I learned that my family did not arrive here until the 1880s or so (decades after the famine). I ran up against the paucity of good Irish records for pre-famine family histories. So, gradually, a story began to take shape in my head … and to take over my life, a bit, for a few weeks or so.
This storytelling is something of a mysterious process to me. I mean, I did not set out to explain my great-great-grandparents’ experience of those times, then embellish the tale with a few folklore nuances. Writing for me is more like playing with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (characters, conflicts, themes, snippets of history) and exploring how they might fit together in an interesting way.
How did you approach writing the Great Famine in a way that honored its suffering without letting the novel become emotionally one-note?
I did struggle a bit with that, as indicated in the Introduction.
I’m not aware of very much wonderful literature to come out of the famine. Maybe it is there and I’ve overlooked it. But it has seemed to me, it is almost a taboo subject. Unlike war, there is nothing much heroic or romantic about starvation. I’ve seen probably dozens of films about WWII, but can only think of one major motion picture about the famine (2018’s Black ’47). So I wanted to pop the lid off and take a look at this time period, without strong notions about what might unfold.
Now, given my family history, it occurred to me that, even though the famine killed or displaced some 25% of the population, many families not only survived but in some cases must even have profited from others’ suffering.
It was too simplistic to blame the British government for the whole calamity. I saw in the Canterbury Tales a framework for laying out a range of human character types, with all their shortcomings, that might have been on display.
Once I started to follow that path, I had begun to avoid monotony. But I did find myself getting caught up in the romance, toward the end, and had to be careful not to lose sight entirely of the horror.
Folklore feels inseparable from daily life in the book. Was that balance shaped more by historical research, family stories, or imagination?
A little of each. But again, the lack of reliable history was a factor. So we’re back to: “Never let the truth (or lack of it) get in the way of a good story.”
Toto the pig brings so much texture and vitality to the story. When did you realize she was essential rather than incidental?
Somewhere along the way I read an old review of The Wizard of Oz, and realized I’d never given much thought to Toto and the role the little dog played in the story.
Toto represents innocence, but a knowing, uncorrupted innocence (not unlike that of the little boy who points out the emperor has no clothes).
It is Toto who pulls back the curtain on the Wizard. When I realized how appropriate that was, iI realized it would be quite nice to have the pig pull off the Hag’s cloak.
Now, in Tom Ryan, there’s another dimension to the pig. Toto represents a few good meals worth of meat. So it’s a marvelous thing she survives the journey.
But Toto the pig isn’t entirely there for explanatory power (as a metaphor for a relationship between innocence and wisdom). She’s there, too, to allude to the Wizard of Oz, to resonate with a story-telling tradition and our shared childhood memories.
Author Links: Facebook | Website
The Irish countryside has turned perilous. Starving families line the roads; ruthless land agents enforce brutal order. Soup kitchens trade food for faith as secret societies lurk in the shadows. And always nearby is the enigmatic old seer known only as The Hag, who dispenses cryptic wisdom, demands small services, and intervenes in destinies with unsettling precision.
Tom Ryan’s Shoes: The Legend of the Banshee Castle is historical fiction infused with Celtic legend, magical realism, and mythic storytelling. Rich in atmosphere and grounded in the history of the Great Famine, this coming-of-age adventure blends folklore, literary depth, dark humor, and historical drama into a powerful tale of resilience and transformation. A Literary Titan Book Award winner.
Jackdaw Affliction
Jackdaw Affliction is a literary novel with the sweep of a family saga and the bruised intimacy of psychological drama. It follows Billy from a rough-edged childhood in 1980s England through grief, family damage, love, illness, and the slow tightening grip of ataxia, while also circling the lives of Becks, Susan, and Will in ways that make the family feel less like a cast and more like a weather system that keeps changing around him. What stayed with me most is how the book moves from youthful freedom, bikes, music, and sibling closeness into something darker and more fragile, until survival itself becomes the central struggle.
Hyde writes in a way that feels unpolished in the best sense of the word, as if Billy is not performing pain for the reader but just trying to get it said before it slips away. That gives the novel a blunt force that I found hard to shake. Some scenes land because they are so matter-of-fact, even when what is happening is shocking or sad. The early sections especially have that mix of memory and menace, where a summer day, a pub garden, a family dinner, or a bike ride can turn in an instant. I also liked how music runs through the book like a private radio station in the background, giving the story texture without feeling gimmicky.
What I found most interesting, and at times most unsettling, was Hyde’s willingness to let the story stay messy. This is not a neat novel, and I do not think it wants to be. The family bonds are loving, warped, tender, and destructive all at once. Later, when Billy’s world narrows under disability and humiliation, the book becomes less about plot in the usual sense and more about endurance, dignity, resentment, and the strange loneliness of being trapped inside a body that no longer lets you move through the world the way you once did. That material could have turned preachy or sentimental, but it mostly doesn’t. It feels authentic. Candid. Sometimes ugly. And sometimes very moving.
I would recommend Jackdaw Affliction most to readers who like literary fiction that takes risks, especially books about family damage, class, memory, and chronic illness that are more interested in emotional truth than polish. Anyone looking for a clean, comforting read may bounce off it. I didn’t always find it easy, but I did find it memorable, and that counts for a lot. It feels like a novel for readers who can sit with discomfort and still listen for the human voice underneath it.
Pages: 286 | ASIN: B0GN47WWPZ
