Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Once Upon A Time
KISS ME SWAMI is Kathalynn’s riveting memoir about how she found herself in the midst of the zeitgeist, a protagonist swept into a series of cultural movements, including finding herself in Hollywood in the 60’s and 70’s, front-row center in an exploding sexual revolution and a lively scene shifting from Old Hollywood; living in the […]
Do’s and Don’ts of Including Mental Illness in Your Fiction
In addition to the joy of being an author, I have also had the privilege of being a clinical psychologist for the last fifteen years. In fact, I practice in mental health full-time as a Pediatric and Perinatal Psychologist and I write in my spare time. My Psychologist job has greatly influenced my writing as […]
What Happened When I Gave Up My Amazon Sales Rank for Lent By Sandra Hutchison
In 2017 I made a little chunk of money as an indie novelist on Amazon, thanks to my first novel THE AWFUL MESS being in one of their Prime reading promotions. Including that one, I had three stand-alone novels out, and I enjoyed some read-through of the others, too, especially in Kindle Unlimited. But as […]
Fourteen Book Covers for Four Books: A Cautionary Tale about Nudity, Flailing, and Copyright
Years ago, I worked as an acquisitions editor and marketing manager in professional and educational publishing. I approved covers, and I tried to wheedle better covers out of busy and/or stubborn design departments, and I defended covers to a lot of disappointed authors. Most I considered unreasonably disappointed, though at least one was absolutely right […]
Sharing Our Stories—Shining a Light
Hendrika de Vries: When A Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew… From the time that I was a little girl curled up on my father’s lap, enchanted by his bedtime stories of fairy-tale heroes and heroines, and mythic far-away places where magical gods and goddesses could morph into animal shapes at […]
Making the Past Present: From Journalism To Historical Fiction
During the summer of 1968 I had the opportunity to work as a reporter for the daily newspaper in Red Wing, Minnesota. Writing up obituaries and descriptions of weddings while seated at my manual typewriter was okay for a week or two but soon I became hungry to get out on assignment to do interviews […]
Under Grandma’s Table
UNDER GRANDMA’S TABLE It was summertime 1926—a hot steamy night in western Kansas. Peering out from under the table, she looked around her grandmother’s kitchen. Seeing only the bottom half of things—the pie cupboard with the tiny bird-designs tapped into the tin front, the squat legs of the cast-iron stove, the open back door sending […]
Exactly Like Other Girls
By Felicia Grossman One of the fiction tropes that annoys me the most is the “not-like-other-girls” female lead. She appears across genres and often eschews anything coded “feminine” like clothes and make-up and dating. She’s not popular, but she prevails. Main characters like that and their real-life counterparts are wonderful and fun, but what makes […]
Camping: A Writer’s Strategy for Staying Observant
I am just back from a weekend camping trip to the Oregon dunes with my partner Paul, also a writer. We didn’t plan to write on this trip; we simply wanted some time away in nature, sleeping in a tent. This was car camping, driving with a packed car to a Forest Service site not […]
Second Book Syndrome
I feel as if I’ve always known the phrase ‘that difficult second album’ forever: it lives in my vernacular. Mostly due to the fact that I’m married to a man who has spent his career in the music industry and knows all about troubled artists trying to create a second body of work. Not sure […]
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