Category: Contemporary Women Writers
5 Reasons Why I Took the Series Writing Plunge
By Veronica Cline Barton, Author of My American Almost Royal Cousin Series #CozyMystery When I first started my writing career in late 2016, it didn’t take me long to figure out that I was destined to create a cozy mystery series. It’s my favorite genre, and one where I feel a sense of lovely, deadly, […]
The Weather Here
My own internal and external storms increasingly seem to mirror the weather patterns of climate change. I started noticing this last year, just after turning 60. I closed my law practice, hoping, with my daughter several years out of college, I could turn my attention elsewhere, I could spend time listening to and answering my […]
A TURING TEST FOR FICTION By Katherine Forbes Riley
When can a man write as a woman? A woman of another culture? A brutally raped woman? When is this acceptable and when does it fail a test society hasn’t explicitly defined, but we still see administered? Moreover, the test itself also changes, for we can all name certain memorable books that passed with flying […]
Yes, My Female Characters Have Sex
Yes, my female characters have sex.* *Good sex. And I no longer care if that bothers some people. By Amy Mason Doan My novel SUMMER HOURS was five months from publication when the “S word” first came up. It was on GoodReads, where an advance reader had put the book on a list: “Character You […]
The Spy Who Knew Too Much: Researching and Writing The Prisoner in the Castle
By Susan Elia MacNeal At the end of The Paris Spy, the seventh novel in the New York Times-bestselling and Edgar-nominated Maggie Hope series, our plucky heroine finds herself in a predicament—she’s a British secret agent who knows too much about D-Day. What happened in real life, I wondered, to the spies who knew too […]
On Being A Writer
I was sixteen years old when my first poem was published in The Commercial Appeal, a newspaper in Memphis. TN. The poem, titled “Souvenir” was about the Vietnam War. The year was 1969 and I was in the eleventh grade. I have been writing ever since. I was blessed to have a high school English […]
What A Time To Be Alive
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ So begins The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley, one of my very favourite novels. Although the book is set in the swooning heat of high summer, it’s a line that always gives me goosebumps, and renews my frustration that time machines haven’t yet been invented […]
Essential Writing and Editing Tips By Sheila O’Flanagan
Whenever I’m asked for my number one tip on writing, my response is always the same. Sit down in front of your computer, open whatever WP program you want to use, and start. This may sound glaringly obvious, but the truth is that until you have words on a page in front of you, there […]
Philosophy And Writing
Art is one of the most important game changers and is a reflection of our creativity in human life. In my own life, Salvador Dali is the artist who made me wonder more about ourselves and the World we live in. The first time I saw his paintings, I was so young. I can still […]
TO NATURE (AND NURTURE) YOUR WRITING by Savannah Hendricks
Last year, I had the opportunity to take a road trip to California and attend the Wrightwood Literary Festival. Never having been to the Wrightwood area I was excited about the adventure. I had no idea what to expect. Yet, it’s in California, right outside of the city, how different could it be? The flyer […]
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