K.G. MacGregor's Blog, page 4

Is it paranoid to wonder?

In December of 2017, a cake baker in Colorado argued before the Supreme Court that being compelled by state law to use his artistic abilities to create a wedding cake for a gay couple violated his Christian beliefs. The ACLU took the couple’s side, arguing that an exception based on religious beliefs opens the door […]

A Proper Cuppa Tea (Coming July 2018)

A disastrous office affair has left Channing Hughes bitter, cynical and unemployed. What better time to leave Boston for her native England, where her late grandfather has named her sole heir of the Hughes fortune, as well as Penderworth, a centuries-old manor house that’s been in the family for generations. Only one problem with that […]

Forget me not

Those of you who’ve been kind enough to follow my blog may sometimes wonder why you bother, since I’ve done a miserable job of keeping it updated. It’s a fair question, and I owe you an answer. I’ve been busy. No, really busy. I spent pretty much the whole of January and February bent over […]

Notes on a(nother) scandal

Romance on the public dime. If you’re like me, you’re angry and indignant when it’s someone from the other political party, and disappointed when it’s one of our own. Either way, it exposes a weakness, a character flaw — the allure of sex and/or love proved stronger than one’s sense of duty to the public. […]

Coming this summer — A Proper Cuppa Tea

Nothing feels like this — finishing a manuscript and sending it off to the publisher & editor. It’s a weird feeling when you’ve been pouring 8-10 hours a day into something and all of a sudden it’s done. Even after just a few hours (and two more episodes of Prisoners’ Wives), I feel strangely guilty, […]

Resolved for 2018

On the heels of my Top 10 list comes my other annual rite — resolutions for the coming year. I’ve always appreciated how the mark of a New Year makes us look ahead with aspirations to be somehow “better.” But as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. To be healthier, we must […]

Top 10 of 2017

Welcome to my 12th annual Top 10 list. Each year after Christmas, I look back over my calendars, social media posts and blogs, and try to zero in on the most noteworthy bits and pieces so I can memorialize them in one place. If you’ve followed me at all this year on social media, you’ve […]

An existential crisis of title

The good news is that I’m about halfway through my next book. I still like it (mostly), though a couple of times I hit that familiar hurdle when I convinced myself it was utter garbage because I’m a hack. Each time I was able to back up and rework the gnarly bits until I liked […]

Fanfiction — the stories we wanted but didn’t get

For me, it all started with Xena: Warrior Princess. I watched every minute of every episode hoping to see onscreen something I knew was running rampant when the cameras turned away — romantic love between Xena and Gabrielle. Instead I got 134 episodes of subtext with wink-wink deniability, and a studio vehemently proclaiming this wasn’t […]

Friendship after sexual harassment

It’s complicated. No question it was sexual harassment, but I dealt with it assertively and put it down. The problem came later when we talked about it, and later still when I worked through it for lessons on how to protect myself. He was one of my early professional mentors, a divorced man 20+ years […]