Susanne Dunlap's Blog, page 2

Nothing Is the Same

My Life Changed. But I Still Have a Book Coming Out.

I knew something was wrong with him almost a year ago, but I didn’t know how wrong.

He’d seen me through nearly eleven book launches, was always there for the triumphs and the disappointments. He read my books, he listened to them—mostly listened, because he was a slow reader. The smartest person I knew, but he paid attention to every word, he didn’t gobb...

I sleep surrounded by dead people

I happened to realize the other day that my bedroom walls are decorated with old photographs and drawings of my forebears, all of whom are no more.

There’s my maternal grandmother in her high school graduation picture from 1929. My other grandmother in her wedding gown in 1922. A photograph from 1903 picturing my grandmother as a toddler, her mother, her grandmother, her great aunt, and a neighbor and his mother. And of course, my own ...

Rumor has it your great grandmother was a bootlegger…

So what are you gonna do about it? 

First, how much do you know? What details can you tease out? Where did she live, when did she live, how old was she when all that interesting stuff was happening….

And then, if it were my great grandmother, I’d start digging into more research. I’d look into bootlegging in her community and era. I’d see if I could find any connections to other known bootleggers. I’d read up on the history of bootlegg...

Welcome to my new website!

It’s taken me a lot to get to this point. I’ve been a published author for over fifteen years, and I became an Author Accelerator Certified Book coach in early 2020, just before Covid hit. At that time, when coaching was all new, I thought I should split myself in two and be an author in one place and a book coach in another.

But over time, I realized that split was completely artificial, as one aspect is intimately connected to the ot...

Audiobook Adventures

I’ve been making some courageous decisions about my books lately. The most recent of them was deciding to get a good audiobook made of my forthcoming novel, The Portraitist: a Novel of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. She Writes Press will publish the paperback and ebook on August 30, 2022, but She Writes doesn’t currently produce audiobooks. So I kept the audio rights and decided to do it on my own dime.

Why would I make a decision that will cost me upwards of $3,000 with no guarantee of return? Some w...

Medieval Measurement: Time

I pride myself on doing my research thoroughly and efficiently—as my course, Rein in Your Research attests. Yet the one topic I always have to investigate again and again when I write novels set before the 17th century concerns measurement. Many of the units and types of measurement we take for granted weren’t in common use before then, if they existed at all. Which makes describing how far, how long, how much time etc. a bit trickier than it might seem.

Our everyday obsession with measurement i...

The Long Road to VOICES IN THE MIST

The first two volumes of my trilogy, The Orphans of Tolosa, came out within a year of each other in 2019. My original plan was to publish the final volume, Voices in the Mist, in 2020. That turned out to be wishful thinking. I had no idea of the long road I would have to travel before I could do that.

The good news is that Voices in the Mist will be available on September 21 of this year. Wisdom is that one shouldn’t make readers wait so long. But I can do nothing about that, except give my read...

Of reading, writing, and coaching

It has been a long time since I’ve posted here. Yes, I’ve been busy. But it’s more than that. A lot going on both personally and professionally. Right now I should be rehearsing the live webinar I’m giving on Tuesday that’s related to my coaching, but somehow I want to be a reader and a writer for a while today instead. Or in addition. That could be partly because I just watched the She Writes Press onboarding webinar I missed when it was live. My novel The Portraitist will be published by them ...

Music and Wintering

It’s been far too long since I wrote a blog post. Every time I decided I should start one over the last few months, I found an excuse not to. I can’t really explain my recent relative silence. Yes, the flurry of promotion for The Paris Affair sapped me a bit. And with everything that happened in the election and its aftermath, I felt beat up emotionally. Of course, there’s also Covid. I and all my family have remained, thankfully, healthy, but there has been so much loss among those I know.

I ma...

Congratulations to the giveaway winners!

First, thank you to everyone who entered The Paris Affair giveaway!

I'm pleased to announce that Angela DeSilva, Cathy Tilton, and Tina Whitney have won a signed copy of the paperback. Your books will be on their way to you in the next few days!