Rebecca Talley's Blog, page 33

Hometown Girl by Michele Ashman Bell

From the back cover:
Jocelyn Rogers's life is in a rut. Maybe she should step outside her comfort zone and move to Milford Falls, where she has inherited her grandmother's house. With the encouragement of the other Butterfly Girls, Jocelyn musters her courage and starts a new life.

However, when she arrives in the small town that holds both good and bad memories for her, she discovers the house in worse shape than she expected, and getting repairs done is anything but easy — especially when...

Hear Me Roar

Several weeks ago, my laptop keyboard started acting up. The enter key and the right shift key both stopped responding regularly. Here and there they would respond, until one day, the enter key completely stopped working and a few days later so did the shift key. It's very hard  to write anything without those two keys. The shift key on the left side still worked so I retrained myself to use that key. My husband told me to use control-m to mimic the enter key and that worked for a few days un...

I Love Nintendo

A few weeks ago, we lost our Wii when a lightning storm hit too close to our house. We also lost phone service, access to the internet, and thought we'd lost  a flat screen computer monitor. The first summer we lived here, lightning hit so close to the house that we lost our garage door openers, a TV, it messed up our dryer, and we lost the electric line to our water pump which meant we had no water. The water issue put us in a crisis and we had to hire someone to dig up the electric line and...

Parking Lot Rage

Thunder and Lightning

Last night we had an amazing lightning storm. It was as if we were in the heart of the whole storm because we had lightning flashes on all sides of our house. We turned out the lights so we could see the awesome display. Thankfully, we'd unplugged all of our electronics so we didn't have any losses. There was certainly a lot of power in that storm. It made me realize how very little control we have of the world around us. Should  lightning have struck our house there would've been nothing we ...

Using Experiences in Writing

I think that all novels are somewhat biographical because if you give 10 authors the same prompt, each will create a unique story because we write from our experiences.

I'm sure Stephenie Meyer never interacted with vampires. But, maybe she felt ordinary like Bella. Maybe she was attracted to a young man that seemed perfect in every way while she was in high school. Maybe she feared for her family's safety at some point. Dave Farland spoke at the LDStorymakers Conference in April and he commen...

Becoming Kate by Dixie Owens

Back Cover:

Elizabeth Lindsay, wife and mother of two, is in an auto accident. She awakens in a hospital with strangers calling her Kate. She learns that she perished in the accident and is the donor for the first successful brain transplant. Her mind and memories now reside in the body of eleven-year old Kate. She's not supposed to have a personal memory, but ... Elizabeth is faced with an overwhelming situation. How does she resolve her death and rebirth? How does she stop being Liz and...

Shoot Me Some Coyote

Beware: Rant in Progress

I am completely distraught. We have been trying and trying to raise goats. We started with a small herd and have spent a lot of time, energy, and money putting up fence and making our field safe for the goats. We even have a llama because we'd researched natural ways to protect our goats and decided we'd try a llama (donkeys are also recommended).

We finally had some baby goats survive a few weeks ago. They're absolutely darling. We've been watching them grow and love t...

LDStorymakers Conference

I'm so excited about the LDStorymakers Conference next year. It will be May 6-7, 2011 at the Salt Lake City, UT Sheraton. It's going to be amazing. I'm thrilled to be on the 2011 Conference Committee as a co-chair with Tristi Pinkston for Bootcamp.

Tristi and I are both very excited about Bootcamp. We have made one major change. Here's the official announcement:

In response to the feedback from conference attendees, including our sister group Authors Incognito, the conference committee has...

Teaser for The Upside of Down

What do you think?