I’m excited to see an article I wrote about why I love reviews (even the less than great ones) in the December issue of Indie Authors Monthly! You can read it here for free (and without signing up for anything). Scroll down to the December issue. You should see an arrow on the right that allows you to flip the pages. Happy reading! Authors also featured in the December issue are: R.L. Jackson, Erica Graham, Carole P. Roman, Mary…
Here’s a short excerpt from my travelogue Notes of a Naive Traveler, about one of the many impressive holy sites in Nepal I was lucky enough to visit. December 4, 1999: Budhanilkantha and Sundarijal Last weekend, our neighbor’s son Shekhar and various family members took me to Budhanilkantha and Sundarijal, two holy sites close to our house. To get to Budhanilkantha, Shekhar led us up the very high hill behind our house, through a collection of tiny villages bordering the…
Notes of a Naive Traveler: Nepal and Thailand is now available as PAPERBACK on Amazon and Barnes & Noble!!! Yippee! And it’s already received four 5 star reviews!! “Rich and descriptive, it is the next best thing to being there.” – Janice J. Richardson “It did more than send me down the well worn path of Jane or Joe tourist, instead, it gave me an in depth view into the lives or ordinary folk I’d pass on the street of…
Amsterdam’s experiencing an unexpected yet welcome heat wave, which means I’ve been on the beach more than behind my computer 🙂 Many thanks to Lucia N. Davis and Andrew Cairns for featuring me on their blogs these past two weeks! I feel honored to be the first person Lucia N. Davis interviewed for her blog. It was lovely to revisit the places which inspired my novels. Thanks, Lucia! You can read the entire interview on her blog. Andrew Cairns invited…
I thought I was so cool, handing over twenty-five Euros to a freshly washed junkie I’d met in a Red Light District coffeeshop, instead of one of the smellier ones lurking on the poorly-lit bridges crisscrossing the canals. As soon as he pocketed the cash, he scurried outside and charged down the street. I hurried after him, half-running to keep up. When he darted into a darkened alleyway, I froze and my guard went up. Was he robbing me, or…
I am often asked by author friends new to Twitter what hashtags are and why they should be using them. Quite simply, when you tweet a message with no hashtags it is invisible to anyone not following you. And when you are just starting out, that won’t be many people. Twitter users can ‘find’ tweets two ways: searching for a keyword or checking their favorite hashtag streams. Yet the results are surprisingly different. Try it one time. For example, when…
April is upon us which means ‘Fiction and Memoirs by Expats and Travelers month’ is now officially over. Many thanks to everyone who stopped by my blog in March to read the seven wonderful articles and interviews by Melissa Burovac, Jill Dobbe, Anne Hamilton, myself (Jennifer S. Alderson), Beth Green, Pamela Allegretto and Annika Milisic-Stanley. It was an honor for me to feature their posts and I enjoyed learning more about all of their stories! If you missed any of…
So far this month we have been introduced to three travel memoir authors – Melissa Burovac, Jill Dobbe and Anne Hamilton – and their unique stories. It has been a pleasure reading about their journeys and how their travels influenced their writing. The rest of the month I will feature articles by former and current expats and authors Beth Green, Annika Milisc-Stanley and Pamela Allegretto here on my blog. Today I want to share my own story about how I…
In a few short weeks I will be releasing Notes of a Naive Traveler, excerpts from travel journals and emails I’d written while volunteering in Kathmandu and backpacking through Nepal and Thailand. This journey also served as the basis for my first novel, a travel thriller entitled Down and Out in Kathmandu. My plan was to volunteer in Nepal for four months then backpack around Southeast Asia for another six. Things didn’t quite work out that way… Traveling is an…