Good afternoon Fiction Friends!

Our post is all about fall today! What are some things that are nonnegotiable for you when this cool season rolls in after summer? We asked around the office and came up with the top 5. Drumroll please………

1) Apple picking for fresh homemade apple sauce made the Italian way with plenty of butter and saffron.

2) Switching out your summer and spring clothes in your closet for your fall and winter pieces. Make sure and organize them by shirts, jackets, sweaters, pants, and skirts, then you can just grab things and put an outfit together, no shuffling through the closet.

3) Stepping on every crunchy leaf you can find and sipping a pumpkin spice latte while you do it.

4) Going to a pumpkin patch that has everything, and I mean everything. I want a wagon to carry my pumpkin that I choose, I want pumpkin spiced donuts, I want a corn maze with scarecrows, and I want a petting zoo where I can feed the animals. You aren’t supposed to feed the animals in the city. Take me out to the country where I can feed the animals.

5) Boots, boots, and more boots. I love seeing all of the different styles of boots that come out when fall starts. There are brown ones, black ones, grey ones, purple ones, Cowboy boots, tall boots, short boots. I love boots and the different ways you can wear them.  Boots scream fall to me.

What do you absolutely have to do when fall starts? Continue reading / Leave a comment…

Hello Fiction Friends,

I had the pleasure of meeting one of our great authors this weekend. When I first started working here at Moody Publishers, I was corresponding with Jocelyn Green and noticed on her email signature that she lives on the same street that I did when I attended the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. It was a fun little coincidence to me. Well, my husband and I took a little trip back to that area this past weekend for a get together with some of his college buddies and their wives and I was able to pop in on Jocelyn and finally meet her face to face. This was my first sit down with an author and it was really neat to hear about her process and see firsthand the different ways in which she organizes herself and her thoughts. Here are 5 fun little facts that I learned about Jocelyn and her writing process:

1) The 4 Civil War fiction novels that Jocelyn is writing for us are her first fiction novels. She has done so much research. In order to keep her ideas organized, she tapes colored index cards to the wall with one line running east to west with actual historical events and then cards running north and south that are fiction lines she is adding in.

2) She also keeps bulletin boards that are packed with pictures of real people from the specific time and place she is writing about, samples of clothes, and pictures of the actual places. Continue reading / Leave a comment…