The Buzz
Catch up on all the latest News and Happenings at Bees’ Knees Creatives!
Where an Idea Came From
Ideas come from interesting places. One came from the christian myth about The Rapture. It is one of those ideas that comes back around every few years, whether it's from a sermon or a headline. The Left Behind series alone is still sitting on half the shelves in Christian fiction almost twenty years after the last book came out.
I began wondering what would happen if it worked the other way. What if it wasn't the righteous who disappeared, but the genuinely evil? (Full disclosure: I wonder… a lot!)
My Fall Projects Article Just Hit Newsstands
A couple of weeks ago, an envelope of author copies showed up, and it took me a second to place them. Turns out I had good reason: the piece originally ran in Issue 13 of Backwoods Survival Guide back in 2021, and they reran it for Issue 39. I'd genuinely forgotten it existed until it landed on my doorstep five years later.
What I've Been Working On This Month
This month split pretty evenly between finishing something old and starting something new, which is about as normal as my desk ever gets.
A Ghost Like Me went back to my editor, Ryan, after I'd let it sit untouched for about six months. That distance turned out to be the best editing tool I didn't know I had. I'd read a paragraph and think, wow, I wrote that 🥰, and two paragraphs later, wow, I wrote THAT? 🤢🤮. The big structural task was shifting the entire manuscript's tense, which forced me to read every single sentence instead of skimming past the ones I already knew by heart. In the process I found a pet word I'd used more than seventy times and managed to whittle it down to nineteen.
From Rough Draft to Finished Story: My Process
Every story begins the same way: with a blank page.
Getting the story out of your head and onto the page is often the hardest part. It took me a long time to accept that I didn’t need every sentence to be perfect before moving on. In fact, trying to make every paragraph flawless usually meant I wasn’t making any progress at all.
Writers generally fall into two camps: plotters and pantsers.
I love the smell of fresh ink in the morning!
The latest issue of Backwoods Survival Guide is heading to newsstands coast to coast May 29th 2026 — and it's got my byline in it!