For the last several years during Lent, I have participated in Lent Madness. It’s an online competition in which you receive each day a bracket of two saints and a mini bio of each. Choose the saint you like, tick the box beside their name, and press VOTE. Votes are tallied in real time, and at the end of the voting period the winner advances to the next round. It's…
As an inveterate walker, I appreciate a good map, the hard-copy kind. As a reader, I find a map not only helpful but it often makes a fictional journey seem more real. I love knowing where a character I’m reading about is on a journey, to imagine the scenery and terrain, and to clock the distance. Having hiked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela three times along three different routes,…
When it came to creating the characters in A Flight of Saints, I knew what I didn’t want—a cast of stock medieval archetypes. I wanted them to be 12th-century young women struggling with the same issues we do today (body weight, body hair, being popular, binge drinking, periods and PMS). Our ancestors weren’t so different than we are today. They were real and complicated, and often forced into a blinkered…
A writer never knows where or when an idea might strike: An overheard conversation on a bus or in a shop; a detail in a painting glimpsed in a gallery; a line of poetry; or the gait of the person walking in front of you; all can ignite a story. My idea for A Flight of Saints sprang from a newspaper article about a group of nuns who, having fled…
