At the end of my MFA thesis defense, someone asked me what I wanted to do next. I’d been thinking about this question for a while, and I told the committee that I thought I might try my hand at writing for young people. After a few moments of resounding, deeply uncomfortable silence, someone told me that I should stick to poetry and literary fiction. The underlying implication, that books…
Happy Friday the 13th! And in October, too! Spoopy! This week we’re talking about creativity. Where do we find it? How do we cultivate it? How do we hang onto it? This week we’re talking about creativity. Where do we find it? How do we cultivate it? How do we hang onto it? I’m having a rough week, y’all. For the last year and a half or so I’ve been…
Note: This week we’re talking about the long and arduous process of how we got our agents. I mean, maybe it’s not arduous for everyone, but damned if I didn’t learn a thing or two about patience along the way. I like statistics. When I was in the process of looking for representation, it felt like all the stories I heard were people who’d queried a handful of agents and…
Y’all. I didn’t get home until almost 7 last night. I’ve only spent one entire day at home since August 13th, and I am a homebody. I (try to) maintain a full-time job, a healthy marriage, and I’m currently actively working on THREE manuscripts. And that’s not taking into account the dogs, or exercise, or eating real, healthy food on a regular basis. I clearly did not get the memo…
There are a great many people to whom I owe a hefty debt of gratitude for the fact that in just a few months I’ll be able to walk into my local indie and see a piece of my heart on the shelf. Each and every one of those people (Hopefully! Good glory, you would not believe the nightmares!) will be thanked in my acknowledgments. But there are a…
For this post about people without whom The Queen of Hearts would not exist, I decided to go rogue in order to list a few unexpected influencers: a cranky genius, a maligned but immensely successful author of erotica, a fictional six-year-old, a group of 70,000 over-sharers, and, uh, me. To the usual suspects in a thank-you list (my agent, my editor, my beta readers, my writing groups, and my long-suffering…
Hey there, y’all. I’m Cass, and my historical fantasy epic From Unseen Fire, Book One of the Aven Cycle, comes out on April 3rd. I’m giddily excited to be part of the 2018 Debutante Ball! To best sum up who I am: Slytherin, Targaryen, Bajoran, ENFJ, Leo, bisexual, pagan, proudly geek chic. I’m a lifelong Virginian — born in Harrisonburg, grew up in Richmond, went to the College of William…
This week the Debs are talking about what’s ahead–second books. A few days ago I wrote the last word on the first draft of a book called THE SECRET CHEF, about Bartolomeo Scappi, the cuoco segreto (literally secret chef but meaning private chef) to several Renaissance cardinals and a few Popes. It’s a different era than FEAST OF SORROW, which is set in ancient Rome, so it meant that I…
There’s only one difference between me and Anne, Amy’s fictional author in her hilarious post yesterday: unlike Anne, I know exactly where every cent of my advance went. My advance was split into three payments – the first third upon signature of the book contract, the second third upon delivery of the final manuscript, and the last third upon publication. Each time my agent sent me a check, I…
This week the Debs are talking about the business of writing and earning money through writing. My book, FEAST OF SORROW, launched this last Tuesday. I’m over the moon about it, as you can imagine. NPR Food interviewed me for their blog The Salt this last week and that sent books flying off the shelves and my Amazon ranking upward, breaking into the bestsellers for Italian historical fiction and biographical historical…
