Dear Reader, When the weather starts to turn colder here in the Northeast, I always reach for my knitting needles or my crochet hook. I learned to knit when I was in my early twenties. I didn’t actually want to learn, but a determined aunt ignored my protests, sat me down, and said “you’re going to knit and you’re going to like it.” Sure enough, she was right! Now, a decade later, my favorite part about knitting or crocheting is giving away what I make to the people I love. I always send some prayers and good energy in the direction of the recipient. Its feels so natural to do this–I believe that handmade gifts are, in and of themselves, wishes for blessings. It wasn’t a far leap from there to, “Wouldn’t it be cool if a person could knit magic spells?” And that’s how my novel THE WISHING THREAD was born. In the story, three estranged sisters in the historic village of Tarrytown, New York, must come together to save their family legacy: a yarn shop called The Stitchery that’s rumored to be magical. There, generations of Van Ripper women, going back to the Revolutionary War, have been knitting…

Deciding what to write is always a problem. A blank piece of paper has traditionally been a writer’s nightmare. And a blank computer screen with all of its polite little prompts is, if anything, even more intimidating. But what to write isn’t the only problem-what not to write is even a bigger issue. Even a short thriller – say, one that begins and ends in a week – requires that the writer think carefully about what to say and what to leave out. If each minute in a story covering one-week gets a ten-word sentence, you’d have a book of over 100,000 words and an undifferentiated pile of mush. Writers typically focus on a series of key scenes and leave everything in between to be filled in by the reader’s imagination. If they need more, they usually have the characters recount earlier events and then reflect on them a bit, as they try to tie those prior events into the story. The trick is to shoe-horn the earlier events – the back story – into the story at hand without slowing down the narrative. Sometimes that’s not so easy. The main story line of THE CIRCLE OF THIRTEEN is written…