Robyn Braemer Writes

Cover work is the gateway to a book, right? I will admit, I am often drawn to a cover that catches my eye but it isn't always the sole attraction. I enjoy the Wheel of Time series and those covers are hideous. Absolutely hideous. Rand is supposed to be tall and the cartoon character on the cover always looks so short and stocky. Not at all how I picture any of the characters. But I digress. Cover work trends come and go, just like fashion. Covers can date a book. Covers can give a reader false hope that the slick cover promises a slick interior. Covers can trick a potential reader into thinking that a boring cover means a dull read when the interior can be mind altering. It's a tricky thing, choosing the right cover. That's why cover work often changes. I've changed covers a few times in the hopes that an update will give a better impression. Constant improvement is the goal, though I do like the other covers along the way on the path to "the right cover",...

This story was written almost twenty years ago. I pulled it out of the relic pile, dusted it off, and was startled at how relevant the theme is now, maybe even more so than it was twenty years ago. This is the first time it has been published in a public venue. Freedom by Robyn Braemer Everyone knows about the Mohls, right? It sort of goes without saying since we’ve been under their thumb since the last valiant surrender at Tomahawk. Mohls. The name started out as a joke when the war started. The war started the day the things landed on our soil. It was like Avagrado’s number, enough atoms to fill a pinhead, a mole. They touched down and kept coming. My name is James. Me, I wasn’t around then but I sure heard the stories. Those old men hanging around the work camp sure loved to talk. There was something in their voices that grabbed me and I’d listen for hours, even though I knew how the story ended. Yeah, there was something different in the voices of the men w...

The Zipper Chronicles are standalone books but share some characters and are about traveling between dimensions. In The Horse Keeper by Robyn Braemer we start out in another dimension, a land where plagues devastated the world and set back progress, leaving them in a medieval state. Women have few rights. Ladies are expected to behave in a certain way. Medicine is archaic. The times are forgotten where women could pursue careers or live their lives as they wish. It's a time when women die in childbirth far too often, when a simple infection from a cut can mean a death sentence, and when childhood illness can be fatal. It's about redundancy. Imagine if a sickness wiped out three quarters of the people in your town. A town can only support so many careers. By that I mean, so many bakers, auto mechanics, clothes hanger manufacturers, etc. A plague that takes out so many people at once also destroys skill sets, knowledge, and craft knowledge. Add to the removal of so many...

In May I lost my beloved dog. She lived a long, full life, much longer than could be expected for her breed's life expectancy. Despite knowing that she managed to stay with me much longer than could have been expected, losing her was still amazingly difficult. Morgan was half Akita and half German Shepherd. Now they call the mix a Shepkita but I always called her a Gerkita. The combination makes an amazing dog. At least Morgan was amazing. She was so smart, so beautiful, and so much like a person. On FB I tend to avoid reading comments on "larger" posts. You know, the ones that make the rounds and end up with thousands of comments, aka the troll section. But I also tend to go to comments on some posts that interest me but by the headlines I can tell the articles are click bait. Someone in the comments always summarizes the contents of click bait. I saw a comment in the troll section recently where a guy went off on people calling their dogs fur babies. It upset ...

The Heart Key is the first book I published. Romance novels have a defined formula. There should be a cute meet, the two lovers must meet within x amount of pages at the start of the book, there has to be a conflict making it difficult for them to have a simple time falling into each other's arms and enjoying their new found attraction for each other, and there has to be a happy ending. Simple, right? But who wants to stick to formulas? Well, the thing is, there is a reason the formula exists. Traditional publishers learned long ago that the typical romance novel reader wants those formulas. Some rules can be tweaked and altered slightly but it isn't a romance without the basic formula. The Heart Key started out as formula romance with a science fiction theme, a response to a need from a traditional publisher for trending books at the time. The modern romance reader wants to expand their reading worlds. There are always trends. Back in the 80s it was the bodice ripper rom...

I'll bet every fiction writer owns a book or two of baby names. It's either left over from when we were growing our own families or purchased especially for reference for writing. Maybe current writers Google names instead. It's not the same though. There's something about flipping through pages filled with strange name after strange name or even pages filled with oh so familiar names that is quite time sinking. Someone named their kid what back in the day?! Who knows where those collected names came from? Did someone go through city records? Old magazines? Old books? Now I suspect baby name lists are compiled from computer generated SEOs and slapped together. The world is changing so much. Everything is automated, online, searchable, expected to be free, riddled with bad grammar, and not necessarily valid. The bad grammar is often due to cut and paste, which means the author of the article or list doesn't even bother to read what they've compiled by hitting...

The introduction post begins now. I let the website for Robyn Braemer go earlier this year. Dropped it like a hot potato. There were multiple reasons. When I started, the same month I published my first book, The Heart Key, the price was quite reasonable. Every year the price climbed until it was no longer feasible for what I was doing with it. Frankly, I was not doing much with it. As a struggling author, a penny saved is a penny saved and since it was not paying for itself it had to fall away into the abyss. But I do want a presence out here in the glorious land of the internet, so we're relying on the steady (and reasonably priced -free) blogspot solution. Let's face it, authors want to write stories. We want to write books. We want to imagine amazing cover art that will draw in a potential reader and grab them by the shirt collar and wow them and, yeah, you get the idea. What we don't want to do is try to sell ourselves and wrack our brains for some marketing copy...