I write about people who think their most interesting chapters are behind them

They are usually wrong, and they are usually the last to find out. My heroines are in their forties, fifties and sixties. They have histories, complications, and grown children who don’t call enough.

What happens to them is extraordinary — but it arrives quietly, disguised as coincidence, and it takes them a while to stop explaining it away.

That’s the part I like best. Not the moment someone discovers they have power. The moment they realize they’ve had it for years and have been calling it luck.

I only write places I’ve lived. That’s the one rule I’ve given myself. Whisperwillow Springs is on the Florida coast, where objects hold memory and a town once agreed to forget something. San Amaro rests on ley lines in the California foothills, where ordinary gifts run stronger than they should. Cendara sits just outside Granada, where a guild has kept a craft alive by keeping people alive to each other.

The towns are invented. The light isn’t, and neither is the way people talk to each other in a store they’ve been walking into for years. I have a few more places in me, and I’ll get to them.

You’ll find warmth, dry humor, found family, and romance that takes its time. You’ll also find grief, because the two belong together.

Stay awhile. If you’d like a free story to start with and a note from me now and then, I’d love to welcome you to the Tuesday Club. There’s always room for one more.

— Gabriela