“When my kids were little, I was more intentional about carving out time to write. My first book was written after my husband was home from work,” Linore says. “But every book is different, and now [with my kids grown] it seems more challenging to have more uninterrupted time, especially since my husband recently retired.”

“Sometimes, for minor characters, [the name I pick] will just be a place holder and I’ll say I’ll come back and change it, and they just tend up being that person,” Kirsten says. “For the major characters, I have to make sure they’re not named after someone I know or somebody who thinks I named them after them. So I have to be very intentional about those names.”

“The switch [to writing for adults, rather than children] was difficult because you have to have more content when you’re writing for adults than when you’re writing for children,” Sheri says. To generate enough content in the first romantic suspense book, “I picked four characters to highlight, one female and three men, and put myself in the place of those people as I wrote about their perspective on the crime that had happened.”