Category: Contemporary Women Writers
Mother and Daughter: On the Page and In Real Life
I held the signed book contract in my hands, had video-taped my happy dance for Facebook, and was already dreaming of book store signings and podcast interviews. Only then did I realize my mistake. I’d neglected something important, and now, more than just my debut novel was in peril. Through the years of revisions and […]
The Importance of Obsession by Wendy Trimboli
Every few years I get on a reading kick about extreme mountaineering. The annual assault on Everest by climbers from around the world fills my Twitter feed each May, prompting me to cram more books with titles like Into the Silence and Dark Summit onto my already cluttered bookshelves. While I have zero interest in […]
A Perfect Explanation (Salt Books)
My father was sold by his mother to his aunt for £500. This shocking truth, which came to form the backbone of A Perfect Explanation, was something I’d known all my life. I don’t remember learning it – so casually was it known in the family that its existence was not something of drama. It […]
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 […]
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