WRITING

Authors Interviewing Characters: María Alejandra Barrios Vélez

Authors Interviewing Characters: María Alejandra Barrios Vélez

The Waves Take You Home In this heartfelt story about how the places we run from hold the answers to our deepest challenges, the death of her grandmother brings a young woman home, where she must face the past in order to become the heir of not just the family restaurant, but her own destiny. […]

March 19, 2024 | By | Reply More
Writing, Legacy, and Things Left Behind

Writing, Legacy, and Things Left Behind

Writing, Legacy, and Things Left Behind Intersection and introspection are my words today. Life and its stories circle, entwine and intersect as I prepare to release a new memoir to the world. My stories and prose contain lessons learned and regrets: trust, loss, hardship, joy and legacy infused by the wisdom of life’s review. While […]

March 19, 2024 | By | Reply More
On Writing Rhythm and Clues

On Writing Rhythm and Clues

Texas is a place of extreme weather. Long, months-long dry spells are broken by torrential thunderstorms and heavy flooding. These terrifying yet exhilarating, life-threatening yet life-saving storms were a big inspiration behind Rhythm and Clues (The rhythm is gonna get you March 26, 2024 from St Martin’s Press). As a recovering ex-Texan myself, one of […]

March 19, 2024 | By | Reply More
Alysson Interviews Alycat

Alysson Interviews Alycat

Alycat and the Sunday Scaries “Bourque’s entertaining and captivating story brilliantly showcases the importance of having supportive friends who encourage and uplift each other through life’s ups and downs. Their teamwork, kindness, and positive attitudes are not only admirable but also inspiring.” — The Children’s Book Review It’s Sunday, the day before the school week […]

March 18, 2024 | By | Reply More
Embracing Magic By Jennifer Moorman

Embracing Magic By Jennifer Moorman

Embracing Magic  By Jennifer Moorman Magic has long been used in fictional stories, often as a plot device to move the characters from here to there, to solve problems that are otherwise unsolvable, and to explain why and how events unfold in a particular story. Often magic is used in a way that’s not defined, […]

March 17, 2024 | By | Reply More

HOW TOs and TIPS

Five Things Grief Taught me about Writing

Five Things Grief Taught me about Writing

Five Things Grief Taught me about Writing When grief hits you, it brings along with it a plethora of emotions. Someone, a well-intentioned person, said to me the other day, “Grief goes away in some time. You should write a book on happiness.” I smiled, “I am glad you have theoretical knowledge, not the practical […]

March 19, 2024 | By | Reply More
How To Approach Researching Historical Fiction

How To Approach Researching Historical Fiction

How To Approach Researching Historical Fiction “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” When I first embarked on my debut novel THE TOWER, I wasn’t thinking of L. P. Hartley’s famous opening line of The Go-Between. But when I reflected on my first early stages of research and writing, I realised […]

March 7, 2024 | By | Reply More
How to Create Adult Characters in Young Adult Fiction

How to Create Adult Characters in Young Adult Fiction

How to Create Adult Characters in Young Adult Fiction Young Adult (YA) literature isn’t only for young adults. A 2023 study by WordsRated indicates that 51% of book purchases in the YA category are by those who are between 30 and 44 years old, and 78% of those buyers plan to read the book(s) themselves.  […]

February 26, 2024 | By | Reply More
HOW TO WRITE UNLIKEABLE CHARACTERS YOUR READERS WILL LOVE

HOW TO WRITE UNLIKEABLE CHARACTERS YOUR READERS WILL LOVE

HOW TO WRITE UNLIKEABLE CHARACTERS YOUR READERS WILL LOVE When I wrote my first novel at the age of twenty-three, I really thought I had the whole writing thing nailed. Oh the naivety! You can imagine the shock I felt then, when an editorial company told me in no uncertain terms that my book was […]

February 23, 2024 | By | Reply More
Writing tips: How to Keep Going When the Going Gets Tough

Writing tips: How to Keep Going When the Going Gets Tough

Writing tips: How to Keep Going When the Going Gets Tough KI was writing and submitting for years – finished nine complete novels! – before I got published. Since then, I’ve had fourteen young adult novels published and my shiny new thing is a psychological thriller for adults, The Patient, out with Bookouture 13th February […]

February 13, 2024 | By | Reply More

INTERVIEWS

Alysson Interviews Alycat

Alysson Interviews Alycat

Alycat and the Sunday Scaries “Bourque’s entertaining and captivating story brilliantly showcases the importance of having supportive friends who encourage and uplift each other through life’s ups and downs. Their teamwork, kindness, and positive attitudes are not only admirable but also inspiring.” — The Children’s Book Review It’s Sunday, the day before the school week […]

March 18, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: Diane Josefowicz

Authors Interviewing Characters: Diane Josefowicz

L’AIR DU TEMPS (1985) In 1985, the shooting of Mr. Marfeo disrupts the quiet suburban neighborhood of Maple Bay and prompts thirteen-year-old Zinnia Zompa to reorganize everything she knows about her parents―their preoccupations, obsessions, and above all, their battles with each other. As her understanding of the world grows, Zinnia sees how the violence she […]

March 12, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: Karen Green

Authors Interviewing Characters: Karen Green

YELLOW BIRDS Set just before the digital revolution, Kait is a young woman searching for identity and community among the cast-outs, cast-offs, and other “misfit toys” who refer to themselves as the Yellow Birds and follow a band called the Open Road from town to town. Just as Kait believes she has found her place […]

March 5, 2024 | By | Reply More
How Dreams & Visions Can Guide Your Writing: An Interview With Anna Quinn, Author of Angeline

How Dreams & Visions Can Guide Your Writing: An Interview With Anna Quinn, Author of Angeline

How Dreams & Visions Can Guide Your Writing: An Interview With Anna Quinn, Author of Angeline By Nicole Pyles Featured first on www.wow-womenonwriting.com Every writer has a special way of developing their characters, revealing the setting, and understanding what is to come from a story. Whatever method you personally use, you will be fascinated by […]

March 2, 2024 | By | Reply More
Authors Interviewing Characters: Heather Levy interviews Rae Dixon

Authors Interviewing Characters: Heather Levy interviews Rae Dixon

About HURT FOR ME A single mother’s brutal past threatens to destroy the new life she’s built in this suspenseful dark romance set in the underground world of kink. Rae Dixon is lucky to be alive. Fifteen years ago, she survived being trafficked and abused, escaping her captors to reclaim her life. Now, she’s running […]

February 28, 2024 | By | Reply More

MARKETING AND PUBLISHING

Why is Book Marketing So Damn Hard?

Why is Book Marketing So Damn Hard?

Why is Book Marketing So Damn Hard? I offer a marketing mastermind for writers, called 12 weeks to Book Launch Success. In this group program, I guide novelists and memoir writers to develop a successful launch plan for their book. (If this sounds interesting, more details at the end!) Before developing my program, I interviewed […]

February 8, 2024 | By | Reply More
Things I Wish I’d Known About Book Marketing

Things I Wish I’d Known About Book Marketing

Things I wish I’d known about book marketing: A few specific tips for the author who wants to sell books as well as write them!  (1) When people ask me how I found my agent, I tell them about Publishers Marketplace https://www.publishersmarketplace.com/. This is an enormous database that lists (nearly) every book deal, as well […]

December 3, 2020 | By | 10 Replies More
How I Made Dreaded Book Marketing Fun 

How I Made Dreaded Book Marketing Fun 

I was at a low. I’d just broken up with my literary agent after three years, and it felt as if my publishing dreams would never come true.  I couldn’t sleep.  I was cranky. When The Secret by Rhonda Byrne was published in 2006, I didn’t read it but at 2am one night the Netflix […]

November 21, 2020 | By | 2 Replies More
Second Chances

Second Chances

By Anju Gattani They say cats have nine lives but life doesn’t offer a second chance, at least not in the world of publishing. One book gets one release date, your baby’s out in the world and there’s no turning back.  Now, what if I told you that’s not true. Would you believe me?  What […]

February 17, 2020 | By | 2 Replies More
How To Sell Books: My Marketing Journey

How To Sell Books: My Marketing Journey

I thought my romcom writing career would last forever. I didn’t make much money on my first book, She Sins at Midnight, during its debut year. But I knew going in that would probably be the case. Sales wouldn’t go gangbusters until my second book, The Reinvention of Mimi Finnegan. Which is exactly what happened. […]

November 26, 2018 | By | 10 Replies More

SHORT STORIES

Here’s Why: Short fiction by Anne Leigh Parrish

Here’s Why: Short fiction by Anne Leigh Parrish

Here’s why. You slump, shrink, curl down in your seat, never stand up straight. As if an arrow might pick you off. Not an arrow, a bullet. Not a bullet, a blow. Not a blow, words. Not words, looks. Here’s why. You’re a freak. Four inches in one year? Your father’s colleague says he keeps […]

May 20, 2016 | By | 1 Reply More
Short Fiction: A Sliver of Ivory by Vanessa Lafaye

Short Fiction: A Sliver of Ivory by Vanessa Lafaye

He wanted you to have this. It was written with exaggerated clarity on a scrap of paper, as if the author was unsure of the reader’s grasp of English. The torn paper, rather than a proper card, another signal from the sender. It was signed Elaine, with a rounded, buxom capital E. On the padded […]

January 19, 2016 | By | 2 Replies More
Short Fiction: A New Year’s Friendship

Short Fiction: A New Year’s Friendship

Elaine Walsh Barrington revs up her white BMW and reverses the car out of the double garage behind the house. “I really don’t mind getting a taxi to the station again,” Lorna, her younger sister, says from the passenger seat. “You didn’t have to leave your New Years Day open house like this.” The clenched […]

January 6, 2016 | By | 2 Replies More
Short Fiction: By The Wayside

Short Fiction: By The Wayside

She’s a woman who discards anything which causes sorrow or blocks her path. A man she cares for does both, and she leaves him. She takes only what she really values, an old set of books, a few china plates of her mother’s, an abstract painting she’d found in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She abhors […]

December 20, 2015 | By | 2 Replies More
Non-Fiction: Being Bombed Out

Non-Fiction: Being Bombed Out

This is an account of what it was like to be nine years old and on the receiving end of the bombing power of a well-armed enemy. Like millions in London we were evacuated at the start of the war. My father went to Harpenden with the insurance company he worked for, two days before […]

November 11, 2015 | By | 3 Replies More

AGENT'S CORNER

Q&A with Literary Agent ERIN NIUMATA

Q&A with Literary Agent ERIN NIUMATA

Q&A with Literary Agent ERIN NIUMATA Folio Literary Management, VP and Literary Agent Erin Niumata has been in publishing for over three decades. She started as an editorial assistant at Simon and Schuster in the Touchstone/Fireside division for several years; then moved over to Harper Collins as an editor, and then she went to Avalon […]

October 28, 2023 | By | Reply More
How I Found my Literary Agent

How I Found my Literary Agent

Three years ago, I was a freelance writer with an extremely long Word document chilling on my hard drive. Today, those 98,000 words mark my shift from aspiring writer to fiction author: The Lost Night is coming out from Crown. My novel is a thriller about a woman uncovering the dark truths surrounding her best […]

February 26, 2019 | By | 5 Replies More
Me and My Agent: Christina McDonald and Carly Watters

Me and My Agent: Christina McDonald and Carly Watters

A few days ago I did an interview and one of the questions was did I think having an agent was crucial in this business. The answer for me was a huge, resounding yes. My agent is Carly Watters at P.S. Literary Agency, and I literally wouldn’t be where I am now without her patient […]

February 5, 2019 | By | 1 Reply More
BEING AGENTED IRL – Part Three

BEING AGENTED IRL – Part Three

A Twenty-Five-Question Interview Published as a Five Part Series Part One Part Two | Hosted by MM Finck | | Anonymously Answered By Agented Authors* with Varying Publishing Career Durations and Successes from Debut to Bestselling and Represented by Multiple Literary Agencies of Varying Sizes | QUESTION ELEVEN Historically, how many story ideas do you […]

May 24, 2018 | By | Reply More
BEING AGENTED IRL – Part Two

BEING AGENTED IRL – Part Two

A Twenty-Five-Question Interview Published as a Five Part Series. Read Part One HERE | Hosted by MM Finck | | Anonymously Answered By Agented Authors* with Varying Publishing Career Durations and Successes from Debut to Bestselling and Represented by Multiple Literary Agencies of Varying Sizes | QUESTION SIX Did your first agented manuscript sell? If […]

March 15, 2018 | By | 4 Replies More

Recent Essays

Compiling Aranyani: An Indian Ecowomen Poetry Book by Editor Sonali Sharma

Compiling Aranyani: An Indian Ecowomen Poetry Book by Editor Sonali Sharma

Compiling Aranyani: An Indian Ecowomen Poetry Book by Editor Sonali Sharma The northern mountainous state of Uttarakhand in India is quite famous for its environmental movements and leadership. The well-known Chipko Movement, in which women of the Garhwal Himalayas played a major role in saving the forests from being cut by the woodcutters, is a […]

March 16, 2024 | By | Reply More
Beware the Tall Grass: A Mother’s Love, A Soldier’s Courage, A Writer’s Journey 

Beware the Tall Grass: A Mother’s Love, A Soldier’s Courage, A Writer’s Journey 

Beware the Tall Grass: A Mother’s Love, A Soldier’s Courage, A Writer’s Journey  I’ll never forget where I was when I got the idea for my debut novel Beware the Tall Grass. I was in the car with my husband on the kind of long road trip that takes you away from all your distractions […]

March 15, 2024 | By | Reply More
Chapter excerpt from Just Another Epic Love Poem by Parisa Akhbari

Chapter excerpt from Just Another Epic Love Poem by Parisa Akhbari

Just Another Epic Love Poem Best friendship blossoms into something more in this gorgeously written queer literary romance. For the past five years, Mitra Esfahani has known two constants: her best friend Bea Ortega and The Book—a dogeared notebook in which she and Bea have been exchanging poems since they were thirteen. The rules of […]

March 12, 2024 | By | Reply More
Excerpt: The Wedding Party by L. R. Jones

Excerpt: The Wedding Party by L. R. Jones

For a bride-to-be and her fiancé, secrets and lies make this a killer celebration in this psychological suspense. Carrie and Oliver. A couple completely in love and the hosts of a wedding to remember at Colorado’s legendary Stanley Hotel. This is Carrie’s fairy tale come true. Her fiancé, Oliver, is Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome; […]

March 11, 2024 | By | Reply More
We Certainly Need Doctors But …

We Certainly Need Doctors But …

We Certainly Need Doctors But … By Sandi Gold  In 1986, five neurosurgeons told me I had less than a year to live. Since everything is energy – including me – and love is the highest form of energy there is, to keep myself from dying, I chose to use love.  Following my diagnosis, I […]

March 10, 2024 | By | Reply More
Truth + Tall Tale = Falling Through the Night 

Truth + Tall Tale = Falling Through the Night 

Truth + Tall Tale = Falling Through the Night  Featured first on https://lgbtqreads.com/ I’m pretty ordinary in most ways: middle class, awkward, bookish. I’m a mom and I live in a small city and I’m an omnivore. But some of my experiences have been a bit out of the ordinary: Giving up a child for […]

March 9, 2024 | By | Reply More
The Secret Life of a Publishing Company – Part III

The Secret Life of a Publishing Company – Part III

The Secret Life of a Publishing Company – Part III Welcome to Part III of The Secret Life of a Publishing Company. Part I outlined the motivation for setting up Inkspot Publishing in the first place. Part II presented the blueprint for action, the steps required to bring a book to life. This third instalment […]

March 8, 2024 | By | Reply More
Falling Through the New World: Honoring the Immigrant’s Story

Falling Through the New World: Honoring the Immigrant’s Story

Falling Through the New World Honoring the Immigrant’s Story by Cynthia Reeves My novel in stories Falling Through the New World (Gold Wake Press 2024) arose out of a fascination with my personal history as the American granddaughter of Italian immigrants and the events that spurred that history—World War I and the Spanish Flu epidemic […]

March 7, 2024 | By | Reply More
Writing Across Worlds

Writing Across Worlds

Writing Across Worlds By Alix Christie When I got the call that summer’s day inviting me to visit McDonald Ranch, I whooped at the wheel of my rental car. I was on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana doing preliminary research for a novel about my ancestor’s brother, a Scottish fur trader for the […]

March 6, 2024 | By | Reply More
The Berlin Letters by Katherine Reay, Excerpt

The Berlin Letters by Katherine Reay, Excerpt

THE BERLIN LETTERS Bestselling author Katherine Reay returns with an unforgettable tale of the Cold War and a CIA code breaker who risks everything to free her father from an East German prison. From the time she was a young girl, Luisa Voekler has loved solving puzzles and cracking codes. Brilliant and logical, she’s expected […]

March 5, 2024 | By | Reply More