As a friend once pointed out, the crotchety dowagers do tend to get all the best lines. That may be why I have so many of them in my books.
My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.
I tend to navigate by indirection, meaning that most of the major things in my life have happened when I've been thinking about something else.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
I'm not sure that teaching a Core course is necessarily the best introduction to teaching.
Every young girl wants to be a princess. Then, when you find a real-life one, it's very easy to imagine yourself in that role.
'Purple Plumeria' I dithered over for months and then wrote the whole thing between the beginning of July and end of August. The dithering and procrastination time was three times the writing times.
The minimum I need is six months to allow for dithering, procrastination and the research. The research times varies from book to book; some are faster because they're based off resources I have at my disposal.
When I'm in heavy-duty writing mode, there's something great about reading a series. Soothing, but not distracting too much.
