Karin Kallmaker · Romance · Chocolate

Some things go as planned, and other things don’t. That’s life. In the case of To Boldly Follow, changing plans ended up being a very good thing. How it Started I wanted to release the story, written back in 2017, into the wild for readers who didn’t catch it in its original iteration. That’s it. So simple, right? It’ll just take a couple days, sure. I literally said that aloud because I NEVER…

This post is going to seem like a lot of words to make a very simple point. You could read the table of contents and get the gist. It follows on what I wrote in My Voice and Why Gen AI Can’t Fake It a week or so ago. As I wrote at the end of the post, I’m looking at a couple million words in the rear view mirror, and every project has the same lifecycle. I learn. I write. I learn. I publish. I…

Over the course of a writer’s life the reason to put the words on page can vary along a spectrum from I HAVE TO DO THIS to READERS WANT THIS. Even during the creating of any story that measure slides back and forth. With projects like Frosting on the Cake collections, almost every word is way over on the reader side of the scale. You’ve let me know what novels you adore, and I specifically craft…

Way back in the olden days, after my seventh book (Embrace in Motion), my publisher decided it made sense for me to publish more often than once a year. But she didn’t want me competing with myself, so we decided on a pen name. For me, this meant I could experiment under a new name, stretch genres and so on, without giving my existing readers whiplash. I wrote sci-fi romance, gothic romance, and…

Woo to the hoo! With so much not right in the world, I likely can’t express how happy I will be to head to Albany next week for the Golden Crown Literary Society Annual Conference. Friends. Colleagues. Readers. Comrades in arms. That means so much life-sustaining laughter and joy – because they’re not taking that away from us. I’m going to be busy doing more than signing books with a lot of…

I’ve been mulling over what the people currently abusing their power want. What is it that they’re longing for as they ban books, cancel cancer research, and outlaw human beings? My conclusion is that they want a time based on the past where they were somehow even better off than they already are. What do all those magical days of yore have in common? They ended. All of them. They couldn’t…

To my author friends, regardless of how you publish When times are uncertain and consumer confidence plummets, perceived luxuries are the first things people give up. Books, movies, subscriptions, branded merch/clothing, and travel, to name a few. Boycotts are one thing. Economic chaos and mass sudden unemployment are another thing, and they are very bad news for anyone whose income is from the…

These are weird times. I recently posted on various social media how hard it is to feel that marketing matters right now. And I say that even though I know that stories have always given our community hope. More than ever, we need stories that say our hopes and dreams can come true. That the world ought to be better than it is – we deserve that. One learned lesson is that the world we inhabit has…