Author: Valerie Biel

Travel has been the inspiration for Valerie Biel's Circle of Nine series of young adult historical supsense. You can find out more about her on her website, www.valeriebiel.com, or by clicking on the Blackbirds page here, read her last post here, and buy her books here. Travel tends to be the source of inspiration for many of the stories I write. For instance, the initial idea for my Circle of Nine series came from a visit to a stone circle in County Donegal, Ireland named Beltany, which became the subtitle to the first novel in that series. I’m often inspired…

Valerie Biel is the author of the Circle of Nine series. You can find out more about her on her website www.valeriebiel.com, or by clicking here, read her last post here, and buy her books here. Yes, BUT it’s so much easier to write if you’ve been there. The internet makes it possible to virtually visit nearly every location on the planet, allowing you to experience a place through videos, photos, and other people’s accounts. So much so that you can gather enough pertinent details to use a location you’ve never actually visited as a setting in a book. In…

Valerie Biel is the author of the Circle of Nine series. You can find out more about her at her website, ValerieBiel.com, or by clicking here, see her books here, and read her last post here. Growing up on a farm and in a climate with very distinct seasonal changes, I was always aware of the rhythms of the earth as we progressed through the year--particularly when what often seemed like the never-ending winter finally gave way to spring and the first good-smelling days had us cracking open the windows and shedding our winter coats. You can imagine then when…

Valerie Biel is the author of the YA series Circle of Nine. You can find out more about her here, see her books here, and read her last post here. Perhaps surprisingly to many, October 31 is not just Halloween . . . but to those who follow pagan or wicca traditions it is Samhain (pronounced saah-win or saa-ween), which comes from the Gaelic word “samhuin” or summer’s end. It’s the traditional start of winter and marks the New Year as one of the eight annual Celtic festivals. The Celtic Wheel of the Year plays a predominate role in the…

Valerie Biel writes stories inspired by Celtic mythology in the Circle of Nine series. You can read her latest post here, find out more about her here, and buy her books here. I once read Under the Tuscan sun in Tuscany while basking poolside in the late-summer Italian sun. Corny? Perhaps. But I wasn’t the only one as I spied the same book cover in Swedish on another lounger not far away. (This was some years ago and later in my stay I moved on to the recently-released Fifty Shades of Grey, which I thought I was stealthily reading on…