Ann Minnett, Author

When you live in a beautiful part of the world, people come visit. Some of Mike's relatives will arrive this afternoon from Georgia and will use our studio over the shop as home base for a week. We're taking them to Point of Rocks for great prime rib tonight and, better yet, a true taste of Montana. (@Mile marker 151 between Whitefish and Eureka.) Mike called for reservations and asked the owner to please have the mountain lion pose by their pond to impress the visitors. Not so far fetched! So what, you ask, does that have to do with the photos above? Only that our snowshoe hare friend has been our only resident guest in months. She lives in the rocks outside the shop and loves petunias. The day after these photos were taken we caught the hare with purple sprouting from her mouth... alas, no camera.

No, this is not mine. The forecast called for rain all day yesterday, so we drove nearly 20 miles on a rutted dirt road to look at an original homestead property for sale - 160 wilderness acres surrounded by state and national forests. We're just dreaming about the land, but what an opportunity to photograph wildlife! This is bear country, after all. We both brought our cameras. Aside from two bucks, we spotted this artifact at a creek crossing. Wildlife indeed! My heart went out to that well-endowed woman. How sore she must have been after riding a few jarring miles of dirt road.

Readers may not know how important reviews are to an author. Although an avid reader my entire life, I had written only two book reviews up until three years ago. Both  Peace Like a River by Leif Enger and All the Pretty Horses by Cormack McCarthy moved me so deeply that I had to share my literary love with the world! Now I know that sharing my enjoyment of a novel (blockbuster or lesser-known work) with other readers is important. So I review novels that move me and describe why I recommend them.  Frankly, I won't give a bad review to any novel unless it infuriates me in some way, e.g., plagiarized or terribly terribly written. If I simply don't like the novel, I stop reading and move on. My motto: Support the good ones and ignore the rest! I read all my reviews and try not to live and die by them. Each review is a heart-felt opinion about my novel - a note left by one reader to those who follow. It matters.

I've lived in NW Montana for three years now, but none of my stories take place in this gorgeous setting. Yet. Residual ideas and characters followed me to Montana. I thought I'd have to get them out of my system before writing about what surrounds me here. (Like this year's blooming bear grass at right.) But my Montana story percolation has begun. You see, long before the outline or the seat-of-the-pants first draft, small incidents become feelings, notes become scenes, a collection of women becomes my protagonist, and on and on. Let the story percolate, as writer and teacher Dennis Foley explained at a recent Authors of the Flathead session. Percolation in the form of lists diverts me from finishing the first draft of my second novel. How is NW Montana culturally different from Dallas? Answers to the question alone could delay my writing for days, and has. This morning I drank coffee in a sunny window, read ou...

My novel, Burden of Breath, is a free download today. The only free download day for awhile. Advice to Indie Authors:    Rule #1: Schedule 2 or more days for free book offers.    Rule #2: Always read self-publishing advice before scheduling one free day only. So, in the spirit of It will be all write ... I remain hopeful that thousands of readers will download my book and read it. If the book sells some copies later on, icing on the cake. I've written stories all my life and nervously shared them with a friend or my sister. The simple fact that readers, strangers from anywhere in the world, might read my words... well, it takes my breath away.

How do you accept what you cannot change? Maybe that's too big an assumption on my part, and you don't even try to accept the problem (let's say), but fight fight fight away until you surrender. You likely make yourself miserable in the process. I know because stubborn insistence on what I want rather than what's before my nose has long been my MO. Acceptance is my friend. The other way is not. So, back to the how of acceptance. When I can't change "it," I write a story about "it," dumping all those feelings about why "it' is wrong. The first draft is usually shit (see Hemingway quote from May 2013). Once all those feelings have cleared my system and stare at me from the page, I start playing. How to render "it" unrecognizable to family, friends, and prominent players should I ever publish? 1) Change names - No, Sister, the watercolor artist is not you. 2) Alter locations - That large southern city couldn't be...