Author Archive: Catharine Riggs
AUTHORS INTERVIEWING THEIR CHARACTERS: Catharine Riggs
A Difficult Woman Interviews Her Difficult Women Catharine Riggs Crystal Love is a former loan analyst at a fictional community bank based in Santa Barbara, California. Single with no children, she recently switched careers and works as an adventure guide in Taormina, Italy, where she resides with her mother, romance author Kathi Wright. Crystal is […]
Making Peace with Your ‘One-Star’
Reviews are one of the many details no one seems to mention on the long and arduous journey to publication. I’m not talking trade reviews, which can be grand, tepid, or disappointing, but typically not down-in-the-gutter mean. I’m talking about individual reviews on Amazon and Goodreads that, depending on the word choice, can smack an […]
Running to the Muse
I once attended a ThrillerFest conference featuring author John Sandford, who offered some basic advice: “Write. Just write.” I’m paraphrasing here but essentially he said, “When you treat writing as a job, there’s no time for writer’s block.” The prolific novelist is 74, has won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, and produces an average of […]
Body Image as Theme
My great-aunt Helena was fat. Or so my mother said. She also graduated from medical school in 1925, was the first woman to earn tenure in the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Medicine, and was the first to hold a senior professorship in neuropathology. She wrote books and articles on her specialty, mentored her […]
The Long and Winding Road to My Agent
There I stood, hands trembling, moments away from playing a starring role in my very own thriller. One where an irate passenger strangles an unsuspecting gate attendant in front of hundreds of horrified witnesses. I had flown from LAX to Atlanta and was attempting to board my connecting flight to Tennessee. At the gate a […]
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