After years using the competition, I’ve finally found my community’s forever home Back in 2016, I launched my first online community for writers. At the time, the best option — the one my business partners and I chose — required us to house course-type content in one place, live events in a second, and asynchronous chat in a third online space. …

How to choose the perfect romance author pen name Choosing the right pen name is kind of like finding your one true love–it’s critical to your long-term happiness and often requires trying on a bunch of different variations before you find the perfect match. Back in the days when I…

You’ll laugh when you hear it…well, I laughed — and then I had great sex. — My husband and I met thirteen years ago. I was one-year out of sexless marriage and he’d just been dumped by a woman who was having sex behind his back…when he wasn’t there, unfortunately for him. During the first two years of our relationship, we had sex every single day…

Unless you promote it, in which case just talking about this kind of sex could get you fired — Back in 1994, the Surgeon General of the United States of America was forced to resign over a comment she made while speaking at the United Nations conference on AIDS. She was asked if it would be appropriate to promote masturbation as a way to keep young people from engaging…

And the man she spied on was my high school ethics teacher — This is a true story. I changed the teacher’s name and the town name since this crime happened 34 years ago, and it appears he’s still working in education. Grandma — in our family we called her Nonnie — was widowed at age 54 in 1964. She believed that the…

I *really* want her to be my friend — It started out as curiosity about the mysterious woman who’d stolen my ex-husband’s heart and soul. When James, my then-husband, described the woman he’d fallen in love with he said that she was a lot like me — we both had degrees in Communication and had majored in documentary-filmmaking. Like…

I credit Mr. Rogers for the motivation — “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.” In January 2019…

We might just create more empathetic communities — “James, wake up. Someone broke into the garage last night. It’s a mess.” So began our day. Neither James nor I were particularly mad. We were frustrated, annoyed at the hassle of having to deal with an insurance company and wait around for someone to replace the damaged door and…

Who puts a playground right beside a sewage treatment plant? — I was forty-years-old before a man ever went down on me. Forty. Years old. In my defense… why do I feel like I need a defense?… I’d only ever been in one serious relationship, the one with my husband. And although I’d given him a mouthful of blowjobs in our…