Laura Benedict's Blog

I feel a twist coming on…

Where’s that novel you’ve been working on forever, you might ask. Well, it’s simmering right along. Let’s call it my Texas novel because I’m not ready to share the title (which I am stoked about).

Y’all (See what I did there? In Louisville, where I grew up, there’s a weird twist on y’all that comes out as “you all.” But only in Kentucky, as documented here.), I can’t wait to see what you think of this book. It’s about one man of questionable integrity, an ex-wife, three...

This week, I wrote a short story. It isn’t just any short story. It’s the first piece of fiction I’ve completed in over four years.

The words “four years” leave me breathless. In that I nearly passed out when I first realized it had been that long. I started writing fiction about thirty-five years ago. This was by far the longest I’d gone without finishing a novel or short story.

Reader, during most of the past two and a half years–when my inability to do anything but revise work I’d begun ...

Photo by author

This week, writer Elizabeth Gilbert pulled her upcoming February 2024 novel, THE SNOW FOREST, from publication. In a moving vlog post (I saw it on Instagram), she explained that, over the weekend, she had heard from many devastated readers in Ukraine who could not understand why she would publish a book set in Russia in this time of war.

The story is a novelized version of the real-life Russian Lykov family, who fled to Siberia in the 1930s in the face of religious persecution....

It’s peony time in my garden every Mother’s Day. I prefer my flowers alive and in dirt, thank you very much!

I hope my mother had friends who told her what a good mother she was. She and her sister were terribly close, and so I suspect she was my mother’s best listener. Not only was my mother also an excellent, empathetic listener, she was a prolific sharer. Once, when I flew in for a visit, I left her outside baggage claim while I went inside, to the bathroom, and in that five to seven minu...

Photo by hanibaram, Getty Images Signature, via Canva Pro

Self-publishing is a micro-business. It’s easy to get into, but it’s easier to fail at it than succeed. I’ve succeeded at it, by my standards.

Way back, when my long-suffering, fabulous agent, Agent Susan, told me we were getting zero publisher bites on my third novel manuscript, I was devastated. The reasons for the rejections felt awfully complicated to me. Sometimes books just don’t sell. But I loved and was committed to the story ...

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning.

At our house, we’ve added a half-serious, half-ridiculous line to the saying: Yellow sky, prepare to die. Pretty extreme, yes. It comes from my growing up in tornado-prone landscapes. The pre-tornado skies usually progressed from rainy, to cloudy and still, to yellow, and then tornadoes. I don’t know if this is true everywhere, and so many tornadoes come at night, who knows what the sky looks like. But the pronouncement is...

Dreams are like spider webs peeking out from the depths of summer woods (photo by me)

For the past few days, BLISS HOUSE, the first book in my haunted house gothic series, has been free on Kindle. I’m over the moon that nearly 2000 new readers have downloaded it! Seriously, I’m ridiculously excited. CHARLOTTE’S STORY and THE ABANDONED HEART have hundreds of new readers as well–they are available for .99. I wanted t...

Proof of life, with lipstick, even

It’s been so long since I’ve been in touch, I imagine that I should write you a letter like the ones people send at holidays: “And here we are in Santorini! Harald is no longer a guest of Her Majesty, so we kept the champagne flowing the entire trip. Doesn’t he look wonderful? He came home a strapping shadow of himself, sans Type 2 diabetes! Poor little Gustav accidentally set off a firecracker behind a mule during one of our excursions–thus the eyepatch. ...

An aphorism that came to my mind today was, “Don’t sacrifice the good for the perfect.” I looked it up, and found that it’s a riff on a quote oft attributed to Voltaire (I haven’t even read Candide–bucket list perhaps). “The best is the enemy of the good,” is actually an Italian proverb. I honor the proverb, but prefer the active attitude of “Don’t sacrifice…”

As I looked over the photos I took with a mind to sharing them, I found myself worrying, for just a moment, that they were too cliché. Th...

November.

I love November, particularly this time between Halloween and Thanksgiving. Autumn is in full force, and around here the leaves are glorious. Anyone can take good photos this time of year in Southern Illinois. All you have to do is point and shoot.

Scouty is happy to be part of the scenery.

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