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Hello Friends, As you may know by now, Universal Truth is out in the universe now. I am so proud of this book, of this series, of the whole thing. I am now officially halfway through the series. Well, I’m halfway through the fifth book in the series, but the world has the first three. It is really like an out-of-body experience every day. With The Austen Chronicles, I’ve done my best to write a love letter to Jane Austen, while creating my own stories. If I didn’t think I wa

Hello Friends.  Forgive me if I’ve told this story before, but it is sort of worth telling again. When I told Lea that I had been...

Hello Friends, In my younger, and more vulnerable years, I was given a book that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Like most...

Hello Friends, The late, great, Floridian poet said, “ The waiting is the hardest part .” For real, Mr. Petty. I feel you, sir. Waiting...

Happy Summer Solstice, friends. Where I live, it has been summer for a while, so the “first day of summer” is just a day on the calendar....

Hello Friends,  My day job, as a Dean, consists of finding ways to grow my program while putting out fires in the day-to-day running of...

Hello friends,   Can you believe it's April? It seems like it should be October by now, doesn’t it? I think part of my problem with the...

Hello friends. While I write this, spring has not yet sprung, we are still a few days away from making it official, but it is March and...

Greetings from Snowy Michigan. I’ve capitalized the S in snowy as I firmly believe Snowy Michigan is a real, solid place and thus worthy...

Hello friends. Happy New Year to you. I hope you have found a way to focus on something good. As I said last year, in my January essay, I...

Hello Friends.   As we reach the final chapter of 2024, and as I close in on the final chapter of Jane, the fourth book of The Austen...

Hello friends. How are you? Doing alright? Hang in there.    There is a moment at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian  that is equal...

Hello friends, while I know it is spooky season, I don’t feel particularly interested in spending time thinking about frightening things...

Hello Friends. Happy September. I realize I start a lot of these newsletters with “When I was a kid…” I am about to do it again. I am...

Hello friends,    When I was a kid (relax, this isn’t going to be a back-in-my-day rant), school started after Labor Day and it ended...

Hello Friends,    Before I sit down to write the next book in my series, I revisit the source material. Sure, I’ve read all of Jane...

Hello friends,    Every writer approaches the craft differently. What does a good “first draft” look like and how different is that from...

Hello Friends,  While I know it is only mid-May, not early July, I've been thinking a lot about the phrase “the point of no return.” I am...

Hello friends, Someone asked me not that long ago if I thought The Austen Chronicles were essentially fan fiction. My answer was that I...

Hello friends, George Eliot is reportedly the first person to use the phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” in her 1860 book The Mill...